📚 Trump's Proposed Budget Guts Local Libraries & Museums; Why Libraries Matter In A Fascist Moment
- 'Trump’s Proposed Budget Guts Local Libraries and Museums.' Truthout, April 24, 2026.- Edited.
Luckily for patrons, there appears to be little support for the cuts in Congress.
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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is looking to eliminate funding in fiscal 2027 for the agency that serves as the primary federal funding source for libraries and museums nationwide. But congressional appropriators — who rebuffed similar efforts to gut the agency in fiscal 2026 — expressed little enthusiasm for the proposed cut in interviews with States Newsroom.
Groups representing museums and libraries across the country also blasted the president’s proposal.
The administration is requesting $6 million in fiscal 2027 for the agency, known as the Institute of Museum and Library Services, “for necessary expenses to carry out [its] closure.” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, noted that her panel did not agree to the same Trump request in fiscal 2026 to eliminate funding for the agency.
“I personally have always been a fan of libraries, and it does a lot for local communities,” said Capito, whose panel writes the annual bill to fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services. "So, that’s what he does, he proposes, and then we look at it and make our own decisions,” she said. Last year’s request turned down.. The agency was created by Congress in 1996 and has a mission to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.” The administration has taken major steps to try to dismantle the agency, including through a March 2025 executive order..
- Library, museum organizations push back.. Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Assn., said Trump’s “continued attack” on the agency in the budget request and the March 2025 executive order to shutter it “shows the extent to which the administration is tone deaf to the needs of millions of Americans who rely on libraries every day: older adults and veterans who use library telehealth spaces; unemployed people who use library resources to find a new job or learn new skills; families who count on story time; and students and faculty who do research in school and academic libraries.”...
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-budget-guts-local-libraries-and-museums/
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'Why Libraries Matter in A Fascist Moment,' Truthout, March 19, 2026. “If we lose this as a public good and as a free public service, we will have lost everything,” says Mariame Kaba.
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"A lot of people in power view knowledge as dangerous,” says organizer Mariame Kaba. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes speaks with Kaba and organizers Alison Macrina and Katie Clark about why public libraries matter, not just as places to borrow books, but as vital public infrastructure.
They discuss libraries as spaces where people can gather without spending money, learn together, and build the kind of shared intellectual life that authoritarianism seeks to destroy. The conversation explores book bans, censorship, austerity, AI, political education, and the bipartisan defunding of public goods, while making a powerful case for libraries as sites of struggle, possibility, and collective survival...
https://truthout.org/audio/why-libraries-matter-in-a-fascist-moment/