The Cuts Come to Santa Cruz: Museums and Libraries Threatened 

Editor’s note: This piece has been slightly edited for brevity.

“This grant is no longer in the best interest of the United States.”

That’s what a letter sent to the Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery (MOD) on April 8 read, informing them that the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) had terminated its two grants with no review process, effective immediately.

These cuts followed President Donald Trump’s March executive order that called for the IMLS and six other government entities to drastically reduce legally required operations and eliminate everything that’s not required “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” 

“[The cuts] just mean we’re doing less for the community and participating less in the community of museums that help elevate the work we do,” said MOD executive director Rhiannon Crain.

The MOD’s two terminated grants supported professional development for it’s board of directors and research on the impact of a free or reduced admission program utilized by one third of its visitors. They totaled $758,000, making up about 5 percent of the museum’s funding for the next three years.

More importantly, they were intended to enhance museum experiences for community members.

“We serve 50,000 people a year inside of our museum and several thousand more through outreach,” Crain said. “That’s the kind of opportunity that I think young children in our county deserve.”

For the past month, organizations across Santa Cruz have been reeling from the Trump administration’s assault on federal agencies like the IMLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). These agencies supply grants to local institutions including the MOD, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), UC Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Public Libraries. 

Twenty-one states, including California, sued the Trump administration in April for attempting to dismantle the IMLS and two other agencies, arguing that its actions violated the Constitution. The American Library Association (ALA) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) also filed a separate lawsuit. A ruling is expected in this case by the end of the month. 

The judge in the states’ case granted a preliminary injunction on May 6 that ordered the Trump administration to pause further dismantling, but stopped short of reinstating grants. However, a second injunction granted on May 13 ordered the reversal of the dismantling, including rehiring agency staff, as well as returning and disbursing grants. Santa Cruz institutions won’t be shutting down anytime soon, but they’ve still felt significant wearing effects in the past few weeks as they grappled with grant terminations that imperiled valuable initiatives. 

“I think it’s important to convey to the public that these are not just monies that are being handed out willy-nilly to organizations,” Crain said. “It’s money that people are competing and working really hard to access.”

For Pranav Anand, the principal investigator of the Oaxacan Languages of the Transnational Central Coast project at UCSC, receiving a grant meant putting together a 30-page proposal and thinking very intentionally about what his team wanted to accomplish with the funds. 

“I really believe in the project,” Anand said, referring to this preparation. “That’s work that hasn’t gone in some sense. At the same time, it’s hard not to feel sort of sad that the vision isn’t going to get realized.”

A Month of Chaos and Uncertainty

Before the May 13 injunction, Anand and his team decided to try and appeal their grant termination. They prepared the necessary paperwork, which is usually completed over a year, within the one-month appeal deadline on May 12.

The MOD and MAH decided not to appeal. With deep staffing cuts at the IMLS and NEH, “there’s just no one to ask questions to,” Crain said. Given that the MOD’s access program grant was also related to DEI in museums, she believed it would be unlikely to be chosen for continued funding anyway.

Instead, the MOD and the MAH began reaching out to local donors and organizations to bolster their funding. Both museums also emphasized that their hours and programming wouldn’t change with the cuts; although, the upcoming archival photo project would proceed on a reduced scale. 

However, MAH executive director Ginger Shulick Porcella and other staff decided that, to avoid significant impact on its other programming, the top-salaried employees would go on a four-day workweek.

“It was really important to be able to ensure that we weren’t eliminating positions,” Porcella said. “To really lead by example and show that we’re going to ‘take one for the team’ and get through this together.”

Although the Santa Cruz Public Libraries are well-funded by property and sales taxes, the IMLS cuts to the California State Library would likely have had trickle down effects, especially on their program sharing ebooks and loans between libraries. 

“When we shrink and when the other libraries in that consortium shrink, the contribution is that there’s fewer titles and fewer copies,” said Santa Cruz Public Libraries Director Christopher Platt. “What will translate to Santa Cruz residents is more inconvenience.”

At UCSC, the Humanities Institute’s Oaxacan languages project also seemed to be shrinking before the May 13 injunction. Its grant money was meant to fund collaboration with a community partner organization, a MAH exhibition in spring 2027 and six graduate student stipends. Anand needed to come up with other funding and was considering cutting the number of positions and amount of stipend offered. While these implementations were unfortunate, the relatively low-cost research would have been able to continue on a smaller scale. 

“The bigger impact is that translating that research for our community takes a lot of work, because no one does it,” Anand said, describing the proposed MAH exhibition. “No one really knows how to talk about the science of linguistics to the general public, and that’s what the graduate students were going to really figure out how to do.”

Anand wanted the exhibition to emphasize the value of indigenous languages as well as how language loss can impact one’s identity. As a child of immigrants who lacks what he described as a “connection to the language that my parents grew up speaking natively,” Anand is especially committed to the exhibition’s mission.

“That’s, I think, a common story in our area, right?” he added. 

Rebuilding Programs

“I don’t want to trivialize it,” Platt said of the possible effects IMLS cuts would have on Santa Cruz Libraries. “It is important, and it’s sad because these things have been set up thoughtfully and with a lot of real intent to be using these taxpayer dollars to fund a really efficient public good. If this gets wiped away, then it just makes it all that much less valuable and harder to rebuild.”

The Trump administration had seven days to explain and plan their response to the May 13 injunction. In the report released on May 19, acting IMLS director Keith E. Sonderling said that grants and agency employees placed on leave would be reinstated as per the requirements of the order. 

On the same day as this report, May 19, the Trump administration also requested a stay pending their appeal of the injunction. Emails from the IMLS on May 21 notified grant recipients of the agency’s current compliance with the injunction, but also cited this appeal process and noted that it “may affect the reinstatement of your grant in the future.”

Now, organizations must figure out how to adjust the plans they made in wake of the cuts and plan for using their grants again, if the IMLS adheres to the judge’s order and they end up receiving the funds. 

Anand and the MOD have not gotten communication from the IMLS about funding reinstatement yet. 

“It may be that funding will be released at some point, but given that we need to pay researchers now (starting in the summer), we can’t wait to see what happens,” Anand said in an email to City on a Hill Press. 

At the MAH, the top five salaried staff will remain on reduced staffing and pay through the end of September, unless grants are fully awarded by then. The museum received $50,000 of their archival project grant back on Tuesday, May 27 — not the full grant amount, but enough to ensure the project will continue through 2026.

Beyond how the uncertain outcome of the stay appeal might affect funding, the Trump administration’s proposed budget for 2026 would slash the IMLS altogether. Threats also remain in other areas, including the NEH but also science research and higher education funding.

“It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a sort of collective, ‘Okay, we’re going to go after all of these at once’ kind of thing,” Anand, the UCSC researcher, said. “When we talk about it, it would be nice to frame things as part of a very broad assault on all these kinds of funding and organizations. It’s a wholesale attack on research in the university.”

Platt, the library director, also stressed the difficulty of this situation. “Everyone’s trying really hard,” he said. “I think what we are doing as librarians is focusing on what is important, right?”