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For its part, Humanities Nebraska “partners with hundreds of organizations all across our state every year. If NEH funding goes away, rural areas will suffer the most, as it is more difficult to raise private funds for activities in small communities. We will need to significantly cut back on many different programs that reach people of all ages and walks of life.”

According to Humanities Arkansas, without NEH funding “students’ literacy rates would suffer, the stories of Arkansas’s past and present would go untold, and nonprofits, schools, museums, and historical societies—particularly those in rural areas—would lose access to crucial programming and support.”

The American Council of Learned Societies, which has been advocating over the last seven decades in a bi-partisan coalition for federal support of the humanities, recently issued a statement decrying the federal cuts, stating that “we hold steadfast to the belief that sparked the creation of the NEH: that ‘the humanities are not merely our, but the world’s best hope’.”

The NEH is quite small as federal agencies go; as historian Karin Wulf reported, the NEH’s 2024 grant budget was just $211 million, compared to the National Science Foundation’s $9.06 billion.

But the funding that the NEH provides—to researchers, universities, state humanities councils, and cultural organizations—has an outsize impact.