O

n April 2, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk, notified Nevada Humanities and 55 other humanities councils across the country that their five-year general operating support grant funding has been terminated, effective immediately.

Nevada Humanities has typically received around 75% of its annual budget, which ranges from $1.2 million to $1.5 million, from the now-terminated NEH grant.

The canceled funding was to be distributed to 30 Nevada arts and culture groups for 2025 programming. Nevada Humanities did not reveal the intended recipients, as they had been selected but not yet notified. Visual arts-related projects that the organization funded in 2024 include the Weaving Our Cultures Arts Festival in Las Vegas, the Maynard Dixon exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, and the Far Beyond the Walls exhibition at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. (Full disclosure: Double Scoop received a grant from Nevada Humanities in 2022 to fund a podcast series on art and mental health and a grant in 2020 in collaboration with the Sierra Nevada Ally to fund arts reporting. We have participated in Nevada Humanities-backed panel discussions, as well.)

The cuts to Nevada Humanities and its counterparts comes in the midst of a flurry of cuts to arts and culture institutions. Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill to defund NPR and PBS; an executive order has defunded the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which librarians say will decimate local libraries; and another executive order calls for defunding the Smithsonian, citing “divisive, race-centered ideology.”

The legal basis for cutting this funding is unclear, as the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 mandates federal humanities spending.

“We’re walking a place we’ve never walked before,” said Nevada Humanities Executive Director Christina Barr.

“Our board of trustees is currently examining whether we’ll be able to continue our operations beyond the next few months,” Barr added. “Staff are working with the board to figure out what’s possible. … A  loss of 75% of our budget is a serious blow to our operations.”

Nevada Humanities has four full-time staff members—two in Reno, two in Las Vegas—and contracts a range of consultants. The organization supports programming in literature, history, art, and several other disciplines. Among its signature events are the Las Vegas Book Festival and the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, held in Reno.

Reno-based author Michael P Branch, who was a presenter in the 2024 “Lit Crawl,” sent an email statement describing the role the event plays in the community.

“Stories are our oldest technology as a species—we’re hardwired from childhood to absorb and retell them,” Branch wrote. “But every culture needs spaces in which to tell their stories. For those of us here in the Truckee Meadows, Lit Crawl is the campfire we gather around—a communal storytelling space that cultures have depended on for millennia to define themselves, and to explore and revise their relationship to their home landscape.”

Branch wrote: “We do far less to encourage the arts than almost every other western democracy. I’m all for increasing government efficiency, but to my mind Nevada Humanities is already a terrific example of government efficiency at work. They do so much for so many with so little that to eliminate or even reduce their funding is the opposite of efficiency: it will result in a tremendous loss of state and local culture in exchange for a truly paltry savings.”

The federal humanities budget in 2024 was $251 million, which amounts to 0.0036% of that year’s $6.9 trillion overall federal budget.

Cover image: Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl attendees stroll down California Avenue in Reno. Photo: Maya Hottot/Nevada Humanities