To Our Friends and Supporters,
As you may recall, in April 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) terminated our general operating support grant for fiscal year 2025 (FY25). Soon after that termination, I sent you a message explaining what its impact was going to be on Virginians and how Virginia Humanities was going to move forward.
I write today to give you an update on where we stand first in relation to our federal funding and then to provide some clarity around recent legal decisions as they pertain to the multitude of NEH grant terminations that DOGE carried out last year.
The good news is that some federal funding has returned, albeit in a severely diminished capacity.
On January 23, 2026, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bi-partisan budget bill to fund NEH and the state and territorial council network at their FY24 levels. Every member of Virginia’s Congressional delegation voted in favor of the bill’s passage and President Trump signed the bill into law. According to that legislation $65 million would be distributed mostly on a per capita basis to the council network. In FY24, that same appropriation of $65 million for the council network equaled approximately $1.37 million to support Virginia Humanities’ work.
However, on May 27, 2026, NEH informed us that their leadership would be distributing less than half of those appropriated funds to the state council network. For us, that means instead of $1.37 million, we are receiving $588 thousand along with a one-time bridge of $270 thousand to cover costs from November 2025 through April 2026.
What does this mean for Virginia? On the one hand, having some federal money back in the picture when we were not anticipating any funding is welcome news. We are hopeful that these funds will allow us to increase our investment in grants and fellowship projects seeking to document and preserve our state’s stories and cultural traditions.
On the other hand, not having the full amount appropriated by Congress and signed into law by the President means that we will be unable to support our work and the grants we give at the same levels we have in the past. We will have to maintain the austerity measures put into place after the DOGE cuts while seeking to do as much as we can for Virginians with the funds we’ve been provided.
Finally, as with the financial picture, there are vicissitudes on the legal front.
On May 7, 2026, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in favor of the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Author’s Guild that the many grant terminations carried out by DOGE and NEH in 2025 violated the First and Fifth Amendments and were made without statutory authority.
However, the terminations and reductions to the state humanities councils’ operating grants are not included in this lawsuit and are therefore not affected by this ruling. The Federation of State Humanities Councils and Oregon Humanities filed a separate lawsuit in May 2025 and we continue to wait on that ruling. And it is important to note that this lawsuit focuses only on the FY25 cuts, not the additional FY26 reductions we found out about in May.
I hope this has helped clarify what has been a very complex and chaotic moment in our history and work. Thank you for your continued investment in Virginia Humanities and our work to document, preserve, and tell local and regional stories across the commonwealth—especially in this year as we celebrate the United States’s 250th birthday. And as always, feel free to reach out if you have questions and I hope we can count on you when we need your help to advocate for our work in the future.
All the best,
Matthew Gibson
Executive Director
Virginia Humanities
