The Trump administration has been conducting a shock-and-awe campaign on official Washington that has astonished everyone. Every Republican candidate since Richard Nixon has run against the Beltway establishment and promised, like George W. Bush, to “make Washington accountable.” Trump’s team seems not to realize that campaign promises are meant to be quietly shelved once elections are over. They are attacking the Washington establishment with a determination and speed that has surprised even some supporters.
As with all shock-and-awe campaigns, there is collateral damage. Bureaucrats are having to explain how their work benefits the American people, and to seek other employment if they cannot. Some parents in official Washington are faced with the heartbreaking realization that their children might have to attend less expensive universities. The summer trip to Europe might have to be curtailed.
Conservatives like myself have observed the suffering with a certain sang froid. Shock-and-awe campaigns cannot be conducted without collateral damage, and we are inclined to reach for that heartless Voltaire quote about omelets and eggs. What does cause us distress, however, is the unusual number of what the military sometimes calls friendly fire incidents, sometimes “fratricide.” Friends are being mistaken for foes. Potential allies and potential tools are being discarded that could help achieve the very reforms the president has promised to make.
There are few better examples of fratricide than what is happening at the National Endowment for the Humanities. First the bad news (or good news, depending on whose ox is being gored). DOGE has recommended cutting 70 to 80 percent of the NEH’s staff (the current number is somewhere around 180). It has summarily rescinded funding for over 1,200 current grants. A NEH official announced on National Public Radio that there would be “no upcoming awards” in 2025. There have been reports that DOGE hopes to claw back $175 million in undisbursed grants since 2021. It has been credibly reported that there are discussions in the White House about eliminating both the NEH and the NEA entirely. Humanities advocacy groups are in a state of panic and outrage.
“To destroy the NEH would be to yield to the old-guard Republicans.”
But it’s not time to despair just yet. The budget reconciliation resolution recently passed by the Senate and House and supported by the president still allocates $200 million for the NEH, down only slightly from $211 million last year. During the first Trump presidency the agency’s budget actually increased from $150 to $162 million. The NEH has long had firm support among a core group of Republican legislators. Historically, the record shows, the bloodiest cut in the endowment’s budget, from $172 to $110 million, occurred under President Clinton in 1996.
Furthermore, to abolish the NEH constitutionally would require an act of Congress. The courts are unlikely to accept the administration’s position that it can unilaterally set aside the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and simply refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress. The path of rescission—a constitutional remedy for government overspending—is by far the better one for reasons set out by Yuval Levin. But rescissions would require almost every Republican in Congress to go along with the administration’s impulsive and indiscriminate approach to budget targets. Congress has a better understanding than some in the administration that you can’t hit targets with a blunderbuss.
Nevertheless, it is clear that some of the louder voices in the administration regard the NEH as the enemy. Its elimination exposes in miniature—miniature at least from a budgetary point of view—the ongoing ideological struggle in the White House. On one side are the old-guard Republicans and libertarian techies, who reflexively want to reduce “the size and scope of the federal government,” in the hackneyed phrase. The old-guard Republicans have been calling for the elimination of the NEH for most of my adult life. On the other side are the post-liberals, populists, and others who are willing to think outside the box and find new solutions. The members of the second group want to use the federal government’s economic weight to remake the institutions of government to serve the people. They understand that government doesn’t have to be big to be powerful, and that government power, well used, can restore sound finances, rein in politicized institutions, and provide remedies for the poisonous culture of the illiberal left. They want to use common sense in the service of the common good.
To destroy the NEH would be to yield to the old-guard Republicans who want smaller government at the cost of giving away the power to govern. This approach might have been sensible in Reagan’s time, before the illiberal left took over our institutions, but it isn’t now. We need powerful government to prescribe an antidote for our poisonous hyperpartisan culture.
There are compelling reasons why the White House should not end the NEH and lose this opportunity to restore humanities education in our country to its traditional scope and goals. The NEH, in point of fact, is one of the least politicized and most easily reformable of federal agencies. Its policies are set by the National Council on the Humanities, currently a body of 24 individuals, 7 of whom were appointed in the first Trump presidency. Furthermore, owing to the Biden administration’s neglect, the terms of 21 of the 24 current members have expired, though they are still listed on the NEH’s website as members of the council. The White House has but to wave its appointment wand to have a strong majority on the council.
“Young scholars cannot establish their reputations, be hired, or promoted without research funds.”
A National Humanities Council dominated by sound scholars loyal to the Western tradition and the principles of the American Founding could have a profound influence on research priorities in the humanities. The humanities today have been corrupted by leftist politics in great part because the left controls all the sources of research funding. Young scholars cannot establish their reputations, be hired, or promoted without research funds. Just try getting the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation or the American Council of Learned Societies, these days, to fund a white male doing research on the Founding Fathers—unless, of course, his research is explicitly designed to denigrate or “de-center” them and their achievements. The same project of de-centering the West and poisoning the wells of American tradition can be found down and throughout the food chain of research funding for the humanities.
But now take a look at the grants funded by the NEH in its latest funding rounds. The NEH has 47 major funding programs, each with its own staff, though a number of officials work across multiple programs, moderating the marked tendency to political balkanization. It’s clear that certain topics are catnip for some highly-placed NEH staff. Funding is handed out preferentially to individual scholars who are researching indigenous or Hispanic history and culture, or promoting racialist thinking, gender ideology, radical feminism, post-colonial perspectives, or the impact of climate change. But the NEH also makes a much smaller number of grants that have no obvious partisan coloring, supporting traditional scholars who study, for example, the theology of Thomas Aquinas, medieval history, early modern Catholic theology, Yiddish literature, Egyptology, and religion in early modern Russia. Clearly the progressive activists on the NEH staff are not having it all their own way. In general the NEH makes a point of supporting scholars who have careers outside the small in-group of elite private universities. That is the kind of diversity Trumpians should support.
And that’s not all the NEH does. In addition to grants for individual scholars, the endowment supports digital humanities projects to make the sources of American history and world literature more accessible online. It supports many small museums, archives, and centers, like a whaling museum in Connecticut or the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hall University. It has long played a key role funding library conservation programs and programs to train conservationists, librarians, and archivists. At the University of Utah, it supports a program to encourage free speech by introducing “debate across the curriculum.” In all of this one can see that efforts to make the NEH more neutral (or at least balanced) in its ideological complexion have started to pay off. In general, it is a rule of hyperpartisan institutions that they quickly moderate their behavior once they become more ideologically diverse. The Trump administration has the opportunity to do just that.
To win a NEH grant is a major boost to an individual scholar’s resumé but it can also help provide support and credibility to programs, schools and centers within the world of higher education. In the last few years—above all (but not only) in the 22 red states where Republicans control the governorship and the legislative branch—new schools, centers, programs, and institutes have proliferated, with the goal of providing ideological balance within universities that have fallen under the control of activists. But these programs cannot flourish in isolation from the left educational ecosystem. They need to form partnerships with other departments and programs, attract students, train and employ graduate students, and cultivate cooperative administrators. In the long term the new institutes must justify their existence in terms that colleagues in the wider university can understand and accept. No matter how well funded, the new institutes will make demands on the university’s common resources, and opposition to them will get traction if existing faculty and other institutional stakeholders feel that the new institutes are threatening their own well-being. The new institutions will need prestigious faculty, and they must have positive effects on the school’s record of selectivity and recruitment of students. They must produce quality research. The NEH, in other words, can play a key role in the renaissance of American education by raising the prestige of traditionalist programs within higher education.
The NEH also itself exists in an ecosystem of foundations whose purpose, in whole or in part, is to fund higher education in the humanities. Even though its annual budget is a rounding error within the federal budget as a whole, its current funding of $200 million per year makes it the rough equal of private foundations with endowments of $4 billion or more. In fact, the NEH’s resources exceed those of all private educational foundations with the exception of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ($7.9 billion), a foundation now almost entirely controlled by activists on the illiberal left. At least 35 American universities have endowments larger than $4 billion, but they spend only a small fraction of their resources on the humanities.
In other words, the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and a few of the wealthiest elite universities are the 800-pound gorillas of humanities funding in the US. They are able to set the policy agenda for the humanities nationwide. Of all the stakeholders in humanities education, the NEH has the most “convening power”—the ability to bring together experts, policymakers, and high-level administrators across foundationland. In that environment, it has the power to do a great deal of good. If the Trump administration abolishes the NEH, it will effectively abandon humanities research funding and the careers of young humanities professors to the mercy of the very institutions that have done so much to corrupt and cripple higher education.