Cultural institutions all over Alaska, of all different sizes, are scrambling to figure out what a wave of cuts to federal grants means for local programs and staffing.
Over the last few weeks, museums, libraries and cultural organizations across Alaska have started receiving notice that funds promised to them through federal programs are being terminated in order to align government spending with a recent Trump administration order and the Department of Government Efficiency. In some cases, the money has already been spent, and small, local organizations are struggling to figure out if they’ll be reimbursed.
“It’s really devastating for our field,” said Dixie Clough, who directs Museums Alaska, an organization that helps support museums and cultural centers around the state.
The cuts hitting Alaska institutions are the result of recent changes playing out in two federal entities.
One is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. On March 14, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at reducing federal bureaucracy, which outlined seven government organizations the administration intends to shrink to the maximum extent possible under the law. Among the entities was IMLS, which last year distributed $267 million to libraries and museums around the country in the form of grants and other support. According to reporting from National Public Radio, the institute’s entire staff was placed on administrative leave after a meeting between the organization’s leaders and employees from DOGE.
That means that of the approximately $1.2 million in IMLS funding slated to reach Alaska this year, roughly $900,000 of it is now gone, according to Rachel Nash, president of the Alaska Library Association and the city librarian in Soldotna. Some of that money comes as major awards to larger entities and collections for big projects, but the majority of the grants are for $10,000 or less in form of Native American Library Services Basic Grants that are given to small villages and tribes in order to sustain bare-bones library and lending services.
“For some of them, that is the only money they have for operating on, that’s it,” Nash said.
The community of Iliamna in Southwest Alaska, for example, got a $10,000 grant last year to buy “books, DVDs, other materials, and shelving to support its existing operations and maintain core library services. It will also pay for a new computer work station.”
For many of the small libraries in rural Alaska, the annual grants are a lifeline.
“I can say that with our tiny budget the $10,000 that we receive through that grant every year is what we use to buy reading materials for the library. It is almost our entire budget and we use it to pay for best sellers, children’s books, magazine subscriptions, and our subscription to the Alaska Digital Library. The loss of this grant will be devastating for us,” wrote Theresa Quiner, the library director for the Kuskokwim Consortium Library in Bethel.
The Tuzzy Consortium Library, run out of Utqiagvik, provides library services for seven of the eight smaller communities in the North Slope.
“Without this funding, these libraries would be unable to provide essential services, including summer reading programs, early literacy initiatives, access to educational materials for both children and adults, and digital resources such as newspapers, magazines, books, and films. Additionally, these libraries function as safe spaces for children after school and on weekends,” said the consortium’s director, Teressa Williams.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski signed a letter at the end of March with fellow Republican Susan Collins of Maine and two Democratic colleagues. Addressed to IMLS acting director Keith Sonderling, the message aimed to “remind the Administration” that money for museums and libraries is Congressionally authorized, and that they expect the executive branch to keep funding those programs in “a manner consistent with these allocations enacted in Fiscal Year 2024.”
The other funding source that’s been thrown into disarray is the National Endowment for the Humanities, where a team from DOGE placed 80% of employees on leave and sent notice to its state-level partners that “all awarded grants — including their five-year General Operating Grants and other program-specific awards — were canceled in their entirety, effective April 1,” according to the Federation of State Humanities Councils.
That means major local entities like the Alaska Humanities Forum will likely have to shut down.
“In the long term, it would mean the eventual closure of our organization. We have some reserve funding we’re going to have to tap into now, and we’re engaging in an aggressive fundraising campaign to try to make up this gap,” Alaska Humanities Forum President Kameron Perez-Verdia said. “And we’re fighting this.”
The forum receives about a million dollars from the NEH, and matches that money with local dollars. What that pays for is a number of programs across Alaska, from leadership development and mental health support for young people, to money for filmmakers and helping oversee the Governor’s Arts and Humanities Awards each year.
“What it means for us is we’re going to have to make some serious reductions and cuts immediately for our organization,” Perez-Verdia said. “It will be a tremendous loss to our state.”
The NEH also funds cultural initiatives all over the state, many of them the kind of work that few donors or communities are otherwise able to support. For example, $345,484 for a three-year project at the Museum of the Aleutians in Unalaska to process, archive and curate 80 boxes of artifacts that were excavated from a historical Unangam village on the island between 1986 and 1990.
“They came back a couple years ago, but it’s such a large collection we needed help,” said Virginia Hatfield, the museum’s executive director.
The grant was going to help pay for hundreds of objects not only to be preserved and displayed, but interpreted by scholars and local culture bearers to build a better understanding of how Unangax̂ on the island lived in an earlier era. But on April 2, Hatfield received a letter signed by NEH’s acting chairman Michael McDonald saying that the grant awarded to the museum “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities.”
“Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities,” McDonald wrote in the letter.
“I had to lay off one full-time person who was going to start with us in June, and five part-time people,” Hatfield said.
Of the $48,000 the museum has so far spent on the project, only $33,000 has so far been reimbursed by the NEH. She is not sure how or if the balance of $15,000 will be paid back, but given that the museum is a small nonprofit, it is a non-trivial outstanding bill.
Larger cultural institutions have more ways to absorb the lost funds, but the cuts are still an unwelcome development.
“This was totally unexpected,” said Dr. Rosita Worl, president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau.
SHI lost two grants worth about $300,000 total for ethnographic studies in how Indigenous peoples in Southeast Alaska have harvested, preserved and consumed black seaweed, herring and herring eggs.
“They are vital for our food security, but they also play an important role in our ceremonial and cultural activities,” Worl said.
The institute has not had to lay anyone off as a result of the NEH grant terminations, and is pursuing alternate funding to keep conducting its research programs.
“We’ve made the appeal to our congressional delegation to see what they can do,” World said. “I know we’re not the only ones hurting from the NEH cuts.”
No one is certain what happens next. Clough with Museums Alaska said that even for programs and organizations that have not been told their funding is terminated, staff at the IMLS and NEH have been decimated, and it’s unclear whether there are enough personnel on hand to disburse funds. It is a huge level of uncertainty for Alaska cultural institutions.
“If they haven’t received a letter yet, they are just hoping they won’t. But they’re just spending funds on a project they don’t know if the government will keep paying for,” Clough said.
Murkowski said in a statement Wednesday that “as I have reiterated to the administration, these are funds that have been appropriated by Congress and need to be spent in accordance with all applicable laws. My staff and I are looking at next steps to ensure the Alaska Humanities Forum and Alaska’s libraries receive their grant funding so they can continue to carry out their missions for our state.”
Amanda Coyne, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, wrote Wednesday that he “has long supported IMLS funding and believes that our libraries and our museums are important cultural institutions for Alaska.”
“Senator Sullivan and his staff are monitoring and gathering information about potential layoffs and grant cancelations,” Coyne wrote.
Rep. Nick Begich III did not respond to questions about the cuts and impacts in Alaska.