President Trump must be over the target at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The New York Times is unhappy that “Humanities Endowment Funds Trump’s Priorities After Ending Old Grants.” Subhead: “The $34.8 million allocated by the National Endowment for the Humanities leans toward presidents, statesmen and the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary.” Sounds good to me.
I yield the floor to our friend Roger Kimball, who makes the case for Acting Chairman Michael McDonald’s work at the NEH in the New Criterion September editorial “Endowment returns.” The astute reader can infer Roger’s authorship of the editorial from his use of the Buckleyite adjective “emunctory.” Well, look it up and learn. Roger is the editor of the Buckley compilation Athwart History.
Roger writes:
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Longtime readers will know that The New Criterion has had what might politely be described as a fraught relationship with the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Samuel Lipman, our founding publisher, served on the National Council on the Arts, the official government advisory body for the arts endowment, but his tenure was stormy. That was back in the days when the endowments’ philanthropy was epitomized in the public mind by gifts supporting exhibitions featuring the black-leather-clad S&M photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. We ridiculed those critics who claimed to admire Mapplethorpe’s works for their formal, geometrical excellence, we deplored the extreme pornographic content of the images, and we wondered whether supporting such exhibitions was an appropriate use of taxpayers’ money.
No, that is not quite right. We did not wonder at all. We knew. Yes, there were grants that accorded with the noble goals of the endowments’ enabling legislation, but so much of their largesse was worse than a waste of taxpayer money. It was a veritable affront to taxpayers to deploy their money for such garbage.
Indeed, so much that the NEH and NEA supported was not just trashy, it also embodied what came in recent decades to be called the “woke” spirit of anti-Western, anti-white animus and sexual exoticism and identity politics. As Nikolaus Schuster of the Center for Renewing America observed, “Progressive ideology is the foundation for nearly every action taken by the NEA and the NEH. This has been rooted in grant-making and the operational structure of both agencies.” There are several reasons that The New Criterion has neither sought nor accepted funding from the endowments or other governmental agencies. The often floridly repellent nature of what the endowments have supported comes near the top of the list.
The endowments came into being in 1965, under Lyndon Johnson. It was not until the Nixon years, however, that they got their first serious funding. Since then, various Republican administrations have come to office promising to defund or abolish the endowments. It never happened. They always managed to survive and, often, to expand.
But there is a sea change afoot in Washington, D.C. It began with President Trump’s early executive order banning the cancer of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as a criterion for hiring and advancement in federal agencies and for the support doled out by federal programs. Another sign of change is the work of doge, the coyly named “Department of Government Efficiency” that Elon Musk headed in the early months of the Trump administration and whose work continues to this day.
At the endowments, there lingers some emunctory backwash from the Biden era, grants that had been approved but not yet funded, which the time-serving, hard-to-fire staff hurriedly paid before the gimlet eye of reform could stop them. Included in this category at the neh were grants to study “the race, class, and gender dynamics within an African American hair braiding salon in Las Vegas,” research into “lgbtq+” comic books, and a project “examining strategies to nurture black self love and joy as empowerment for a political struggle.” Yikes.
Thanks to Michael McDonald, the acting chairman of the NEH, all such left-wing effluvium is quickly dissipating. McDonald has been at the endowment in several roles, including general counsel, since 2003. Since becoming acting chairman, he has devoted himself to two large tasks: reversing the damage caused by the previous administration and developing a revitalized vision for the NEH in the Trump era.
Pursuing the first, and in consultation with DOGE, McDonald has reviewed a host of NEH grants dating back to 2021. So far, he has terminated 1,477 awards, totaling $431,580,341. He has also canceled all Biden-era woke programs and special initiatives and ended or suspended nineteen “agenda-driven” programs. He has reduced his staff from 183 to fifty-nine full-time employees, a reduction of about 70 percent. He also eliminated remote-work options, requiring all staff to come to the office five days a week.
On the second front, McDonald has striven to return the endowment to its original purpose: bringing the riches of the Western humanistic tradition to Americans across the county. He has reorganized and streamlined the way the endowment makes grants, giving special attention to a host of projects related to America’s semiquincentennial in 2026. The endowment’s enabling legislation defined its task as to “provide models of excellence to the American people.” In just a few short months, Michael McDonald has reoriented the National Endowment for the Humanities to do just that. He is accomplishing much more, and much better things, with fewer resources, both financial and human.
How much of his reinvigoration of the agency will outlive the current administration is a good question. The institutional sclerosis that bureaucracy naturally fosters is a hardy perennial. But many of the changes that McDonald has made are structural, affecting the heart and soul of the endowment, not simply its quotidian procedures and roster of priorities.
The larger issue concerns the persistence of the progressive, anti-American feeling that has defined elite opinion since the 1960s. To the extent that there is in American society a recoiling from what Elon Musk described as the “mind virus” of woke ideology, many of the pro-American reforms that McDonald has instituted have a good chance of outliving the moment. Only time will tell whether optimism about that apparent shift in the national consciousness is justified. Looking around, we conclude that the reorientation is real, deep-seated, and probably long-lasting. Donald Trump deserves a lot of the credit for this change. Brisk, competent lieutenants like Michael McDonald are playing a major role as well. Bully for them.
