Trump Seeks to Ax Humanities Endowment

White House budget documents released Monday included troubling, if familiar, proposals for supporters of humanities and the arts.

President Trump for the third year called on Congress to wind down the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the two biggest backers of humanities research on college campuses as well as education programs across the country. While the humanities endowment budget is small compared to other agencies, it has played a major role in supporting research, the growth of the digital humanities and efforts to preserve historic documents.

The proposal fits a broader theme in White House budgets to curtail federal support for research more broadly. At the same time, no other research agencies have been targeted for elimination like NEA and NEH, which are relatively small but have significant impact on the work of academics in humanities departments when that support is limited.

Congress has ignored previous proposals from the Trump administration, however, and two letters are currently circulating among lawmakers that would call on appropriators to significantly increase the funding for those agencies.