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About two months ago, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency began ravaging high-profile government offices dedicated to managing Social Security, tax collection, and education, President Donald Trump signed a significant, yet little-noticed, executive order that aimed this reign of destruction at a new target: our public libraries.
The March 14 bulletin on “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” demanded that seven “unnecessary” entities, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, halt all of their ongoing work—granting funds to augment state library budgets, awarding grants for innovative projects—and slash their staffing accordingly. Just days afterward, Trump assigned Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling to take over as acting director of the IMLS, and the new boss straightaway brought in DOGE to assess the tiny, meagerly funded agency of 75 staffers. By month’s end, there’d been yet another massacre: About 80 percent of the staff was placed on administrative leave on March 31, with their layoffs scheduled to become permanent by May 4. In the first few days of April, Sonderling purged the agency’s 23-member advisory board and notified all recent IMLS grantees that their congressionally appropriated funds were canceled; an IMLS employee pasted an “SOS IMLS” sign where it could be seen out of their office window.
As with so many of this administration’s unprecedented moves, the courts have had to step in. Early last month, the American Library Association and the public workers’ union AFSCME sued Sonderling, Trump, and DOGE to halt the IMLS dismantlement; last week, Judge Richard Leon, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, granted a “narrow” and temporary restraining order forbidding the Trump administration from enacting any further IMLS layoffs or grant cancellations, for now, as the case advances. Another lawsuit, from 21 state attorneys general, is going even further, challenging Trump, Sonderling, and myriad other administration officials on constitutional grounds over the March 14 order and its respective impacts on the IMLS, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. On Tuesday, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island granted an injunction that bolstered the pause on taking apart the IMLS and extended it to the other named agencies.
While these injunctions will come as a relief to IMLS affiliates, Trump is not standing down, having now proposed a budget that zeroes out all funds normally delegated to the IMLS, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is not yet clear whether such cuts will go into Congress’ final budget, but Trump has already signed yet more executive orders that have led the NEH, the NEA, and the CPB to cancel millions of dollars’ worth of already-approved grants. The ensuing fallout on local economies, cultural hubs, and basic everyday services has been widespread and deep.
And unless immediate, restorative action is taken to accompany the IMLS court orders, the situation for America’s libraries and museums is likely going to worsen. Without staff reinstatements, the agency’s much-slowed-down operations have depended on just a dozen workers—only two of whom specialize in libraries specifically, and only one of whom has experience delegating federal grants. Just a few of the canceled grants have since been fully restored, one of which went to a Drexel University collection of 1800s-era American art and artifacts that was seen as “consistent with the agency’s priorities in furtherance of the President’s agenda,” per an official email seen by the Philadelphia Inquirer. (The Drexel conservation project includes Civil War drawings, works by Black Philly artist and abolitionist David Bustill Bowser, and a flag from the Perry Expedition.)
These reversals aside, you can scan local media reports from over the past couple of months, from all over the country, and see how much devastation the IMLS overhaul has already caused. The outright closure of the South Dakota State Library. Steep layoffs at the Maine State Library. Access to e-books denied at a Mississippi public library. Digitization efforts scuttled at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum. After-school programs gutted at New Mexico’s Native tribal libraries, equipment upgrades stalled at Alaskan tribal libraries, and summer reading rolled back at dozens of Ohio libraries. Resources once available in Braille for blind constituents in Seattle now cut back. A “bookmobile” that expanded library services to rural Arkansans, no longer rolling. A science education center in upstate New York, blasted with a new half-million-dollar budget hole.
Even if you’re among the millions of Americans who have local library accounts and make frequent use of the myriad in-person and virtual services on offer, you may not know too much about the IMLS and its significance. Created in 1996 with the bipartisan passage of the Library Services and Technology Act, the IMLS is an independent agency that provides significant federal support for our nation’s 35,000 museums and 123,000 public libraries. (Previously, the Department of Education held that responsibility.) “It dispatches federal money in two ways,” explained Phillip Berg, executive director for New Jersey’s Main Library Alliance. “One is through different grant programs, to very large libraries or to state governments, to improve technology and services and make them the best in the world. The other is through allotments to State Library Administrative Agencies, which fund anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of a state’s library budget and help to support libraries in rural and suburban areas.”
Berg’s job, heading a nonprofit alliance that counts 56 Jersey libraries among its roster of member-clients who share resources and technical expertise with one another, gives him a close view of how IMLS has benefited New Jersey as a whole. “From the State Library, we get a Talking Book and Braille Center to serve visually impaired constituents, a thorough digital business database called Reference Solutions, and transportation to deliver materials from one library or address to another,” he said. “I don’t know if the state could afford to continue doing all that if there’s no more federal dollars—you’d see those services either eliminated, reduced, or sent down to the local taxpayer.”
Those state-resourced programs, supported by federal dollars, also extend to public school libraries within primary, secondary, and higher education. At Michigan State University (where I went to school), the capital-L Libraries employ hundreds of staffers and students for the preservation and archival efforts that make their workplace one of the top-ranked research libraries in North America. “IMLS funds certain statewide programs through the Library of Michigan that we participate in, like the Michigan Electronic Library,” MSU Libraries Dean Neil Romanosky told me in an interview. “It’s a collection of e-books, scholarly articles, and databases across all subjects that saves libraries—including ours—tens of thousands of dollars a year, because they don’t have to license those resources themselves. It also has a borrowing and resource-sharing network that can deliver stuff to any Michigan residents.”
While MSU Libraries is dealing with federal-funding chaos—including the loss of an active NEH grant, made to support a historic cookbook digitization initiative, that was rescinded, halting the project—Romanosky emphasized that the state’s potential loss of IMLS funding would hit other places even harder. “A lot of schools here have either very leanly resourced libraries or no library at all. They really rely on these resource-sharing and electronic networks available through the state,” he said. “Somebody from the Upper Peninsula can request something from a library in this area, get it easily and quickly at no charge. It’s an exercise in efficiency—enormous return on investments, something like $26 for every dollar spent on it—when a lot of these movements in the federal government are supposed to be targeted toward further efficiency.”
The crippling of these state resources still means that larger library systems have to trim budgets for their behind-the-scenes work, like job training. Mark Winston is the chief executive officer for Prince George’s County Memorial Library System, in Maryland, which serves over 600,000 cardholders and other community members through a network of 19 branches and a library outpost in Prince George’s correctional facility. Although the large majority of the system’s funding comes from the county’s budget, a quarter of its funding still comes through the state government, meaning IMLS. “Professional development for staff, hiring strategic consultants—we’ve had to halt all that spending,” Winston told me. “This funding allows us to plan how we maintain our buildings, to hire and train staffers who may not have a master’s degree. With that support, we’re able to focus on book collections and employing the staff we need, especially when it comes to helping fired federal workers in the area. Without that funding, it’s almost impossible.”
What’s been further disorienting to librarians is that they never had to deal with this during the first Trump administration. “I dealt with Trump’s first presidency and Biden’s without any problems,” said Joe Sánchez, a former IMLS grantee and an associate professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College. “IMLS has always been a nonpartisan place, because everybody benefits from literacy. I was part of the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program—a grant passed by a Republican president!” (Notably, the D.C. judge who issued the injunction in ALA v. Sonderling is a George W. Bush appointee.)
It’s true that, back in 2018, an IMLS reauthorization bill passed the Senate unanimously and was signed into law by none other than President Donald Trump himself. Yet there were hints during the previous campaign season that he’d take a different approach upon reelection. Last year, the advocacy nonprofit EveryLibrary attempted to raise public awareness that the Heritage Foundation—the ultraconservative think tank that spearheaded the Project 2025 policy blueprint—has, over the years, repeatedly called for eliminating the IMLS. Russell Vought, the Project 2025 co-author and former Heritage fellow who now serves as Office of Management and Budget director, is listed alongside his department as a co-defendant in both of the federal IMLS lawsuits.
Even so, few would have expected the sheer glee this administration has taken in paring down the IMLS. On April 3, DOGE’s official X account tweeted out a congratulatory message to Keith Sonderling for “cancelling $25M in wasteful DEI grants” awarded by IMLS, to which the California State Library responded by noting that its own Braille and Talking Book Library—in the strictest sense, a project intended to increase equity and inclusion of blind patrons—was among the programs. IMLS social media accounts, now answering to the new management, posted infographics on how “the era of using your taxpayer dollars to fund DEI grants is OVER.”
Incidentally, one of the cancellations DOGE tweeted about involved Sánchez’s Laura Bush grant, which it described as “$265K for Queens College in New York to research ‘why BIPOC teens’ read Japanese comic books.” This string of words may sound objectionable to DOGE, but Japanese soft power has had a massive sociopolitical influence on young Americans; understanding manga reading habits is, in fact, a worthy venture. “This three-year grant started in August 2023, and I’ve done 14 focus groups in seven different cities with students to figure out what is it about this type of book that gets them engaged and interested in reading manga,” Sánchez said, adding that he had outstanding payments due to contractors who had worked on this project, meant to be filled in by the grant dollars.
Sánchez was gratified by the recent court decisions but also acknowledged to me that they don’t “undo the months of lost time, disrupted research, and broken trust.” He doesn’t know whether they mean he’ll get the money back anytime soon (“I haven’t heard anything yet”), but Sánchez insists that he remains “committed to finishing this work” because “the demand and the data are still here.”
Indeed, for everyone affected—academics, librarians, students, community members who rely on all sorts of library resources—there’s hope to be had in the fact that both judges overseeing the IMLS lawsuits have written that the cuts will likely be declared illegal, paving a way forward for the projects, funds, and IMLS staffers to get back into business. But these will serve as just one aspect of Trump’s war on libraries; if he can get Congress on board with terminating IMLS funding, there will be fewer legal avenues for redress available. There’s a hard fight ahead, and there’s no telling who else will be hurt along the way.
