Federal grant cuts loom for Adirondack institutions

Libraries, Wild Center, Historic Saranac Lake among those affected

By Aaron Marbone, Adirondack Daily Enterprise staff writer

Local museums and libraries are preparing to weather federal grant cuts after radical changes within the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which has put almost all of its staff on administrative leave and terminated hundreds of its grants — including several locally.

Museum and library leaders are appealing to get access to the grant money they were already promised, 10 Tri-Lakes students have lost summer jobs at the Wild Center nature museum in Tupper Lake because of the cuts, libraries are at risk of losing services and there are numerous IMLS grants that are nonexistent for the foreseeable future.

The IMLS is under new leadership, which says it is aligning the institute with the federal administration’s cost-cutting, patriotic and anti-DEI goals. An executive order from President Donald Trump titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” has ordered the IMLS and several other agencies to be reduced to only what is required by law.

Twenty attorneys general have filed a lawsuit over the gutting of IMLS, including New York’s attorney general, to get museums and libraries the Congressionally allocated money they were promised under contract.

Historic Saranac Lake Executive Director Amy Catania said there’s a lot of uncertainty right now. For her museum, which focuses on the history of Saranac Lake and the surrounding area, they’re trying to get $109,000 of a $250,000 exhibit grant they were promised. HSL put in a request last month to be paid out the $109,000 as they prepare new exhibits for the yet-to-be-opened former home of Edward Livingston Trudeau. On the day they were notified that the allocation of promised money had been approved and would be processed on the following day, the entire IMLS staff was put on paid administrative leave.

The museum’s grant has since been terminated. Museum staff received an email last week indicating that they might be able to get most of the money requested if they provide a report on what the grant is being used for. Catania is “cautiously optimistic” that this is opening the door to get the payment, but she’s doubtful. Since IMLS staff need to do the reviews, and almost all the staff are on administrative leave, she’s not sure who will do it.

HSL Archivist/Curator Chessie Monks-Kelly said they had formed connections with the 77 IMLS staff members over the years. One even visited HSL and was “over the moon” seeing what they were doing with the federal money. Catania said it is sad to see these qualified, caring people put on leave from their work.

An IMLS grant to the Wild Center funded a program which gave 10 local high school students from the Tri-Lakes summer jobs at the nature museum in Tupper Lake, and had them developing community projects related to environmental and natural science in their hometowns. Executive Director Stephanie Ratcliffe called this cut “disappointing.”

She said they tenuously still could get reimbursed for money they already spent, but they have to cut the program short with six months left. It was “heartbreaking” to give the news to the teens that their jobs were cut, she said.

Each student pitched and developed their own project — one was building a greenhouse in Tupper Lake, another was planning a community garden in Keene; a Keene student’s project was focused on teaching about climate change in their school and a Tupper Lake student was developing educational materials for the Wild Center’s fish exhibits. The student working on the Tupper Lake greenhouse is searching for new funding for her project, and an article on her work will be in an upcoming edition of the Enterprise.

Students also helped plan the Wild Center’s Youth Climate Summit, ran presentations and workshops and traveled to other climate summits. Ratcliffe said they were developing work skills. Climate Initiatives Director Jen Kretser said some students were in their second year in the program and were mentoring new students.

During the summer, the grant paid students wages to work on the floor at the museum, interacting with visitors. Now, all these students will have to find different jobs this summer.

The Wild Center’s been working with teens since 2009. Ratcliffe said the $175,711 IMLS grant gave the program structure and allowed the students to be paid for their work. Ratcliffe pointed out that federal grants require dollar-for-dollar matching funds from the recipient.

These IMLS grants don’t support museum and library operating costs, but allow them to experiment with creative and innovative projects, to do “extra” or “special” things. These grants were never guaranteed — HSL applied for them every two years, competing with other museums for the funding — but now, they’ll be impossible to get.

Catania sees these cuts as a challenge — a time for HSL to pivot and find support from supporters. She said they need them more than ever.

“We’re not going to let this stop us,” she said. “We’re going to continue to do the right thing, and we’re gonna do it with or without the help of the federal government.”

To adapt, she said they’ll need to raise more money from donors and seek grants outside of the IMLS.

Ratcliffe said these merit-based grants are highly competitive, and the Wild Center is “really good” at getting them. She said the museum has always had one grant going, and sometimes up to three at a time.

“We’re not going to stop our good work,” Ratcliffe said. “It’s just going to get harder and that work might get slowed down.”

She said they’ll need to ask more of their donor base.

Ratcliffe said these cuts weaken “cultural anchors,” with an outsized effect on rural communities, which have fewer funding opportunities. The IMLS is such a small piece of the federal budget, she said she does not understand why it was targeted for cuts.

“The notion that it is somehow reducing federal spending just doesn’t make sense to me,” Ratcliffe said.

The IMLS represents 0.0046% of the federal budget, she said. Yet, Ratcliffe said it’s not dramatic to say these cuts are “crippling” to the museum field.

“(It’s) surprising, honestly, that that’s something that anybody would think is OK to do to museums and libraries,” Catania said.

Around the museum and library community, the question people have been asking is “why?”

Earlier this month, HSL got an email announcing the termination of its grants, saying it was being done “in alignment with the agency’s updated priorities” citing the bureaucracy-reducing executive order. IMLS acting director Keith Sonderling’s swearing-in at IMLS headquarters on the day its staff were put on administrative leave was attended by security and Department of Government Efficiency staffers.

“Upon further review, IMLS has determined that your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program,” Sonderling wrote to HSL. “IMLS is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”

Earlier this month, the IMLS’ X account shared a Fox News story about DOGE slashing millions in DEI contracts and wrote “The era of using your taxpayer dollars to fund DEI grants is OVER.” An IMLS Instagram post shared added: “Here’s what your tax dollars were funding at the IMLS” and includes items like “$105,000 to address ‘systemic racism’ in museums,” “$400,000 to research LGBTQ+ library users’ metadata” and “$1.5 million for social justice programming.”

“What bothers me, personally, is that we work so hard to serve the whole community,” Catania said. “We don’t ask people who they vote for. We respect everybody regardless of their nationality, race, income level, politics.”

She said they see themselves as one of the few places people of all sorts can gather without division, and she found it “absurd and offensive” to be told they’re divisive.

Soon after he was appointed, Sonderling detailed IMLS’ new priorities in a statement: “We will revitalize IMLS and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.”

Earlier this month, the majority of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 180 employees were terminated and 85% of its promised grants were cancelled. The New York Times reports that around $17 million of these grants are expected to be redirected to fund Trump’s planned sculpture garden celebrating America’s 250th “semiquincentennial” anniversary next July 4.

While HSL does not get grants directly from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Monks-Kelly said they “trickle-down” from the national level, to Humanities New York and then to HSL. One of these local grants was cut.

HSL had been awarded $10,000 to consult with Dave Fadden, who directs the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center in Onchiota, for HSL’s exhibits on Indigenous people in the Tri-Lakes — a history that had been obscured for a long time. HSL got $9,000 back, but is still out $1,000. It’s not a lot, Catania said, but there are little costs here and there that the museum may need to absorb.

Last week, they got an email from the National Endowment for the Humanities littered with punctuation errors and question marks after their names.

“As we assess our programs in preparation for the celebration of the nation’s semi-quincentennial, we will not be offering the (Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions) program in 2025. We currently have no information on plans beyond that time,” the email reads. “We wish you all the best with your work.? Sincerely,?? Division of Preservation and Access.”

Libraries

New York got $19.9 million from the IMLS in 2024. Around $8 million of that goes to the state library.

So far, three states — California, Connecticut and Washington — have had their state library grants terminated. New York has not, currently. Northern New York Library Network Executive Director Meg Backus believes the IMLS funding to the state should keep coming through at least through October, but no one knows for sure.

Backus said most libraries don’t get direct IMLS funding, but every library would be affected by IMLS state library cuts if they happen. Libraries get indirect federal support in a “cascading effect” where money is funneled from the federal level to the state, to the region and then to the local level.

Backus said 55 of the 84 positions in the state library are funded by the IMLS. Its division of library development does a “bazillion” things for day-to-day operations for every library in the state — supporting summer reading and adult literacy programs, gathering data for libraries, offering free access to expensive catalog software which keeps track of where books are and administrating the funding and billing from the state budget to library systems.

If state library can’t offer these services, it would fall to the 7,000 local libraries to pay for or run the services themselves. Backus said the state is also considering raising the $15 “cultural education fee” it places on every real estate transaction in the state to $20, which is estimated to generate $7 million annually, nearly filling that potential $8 million gap.

What federal grant money funded

A $426,000 grant was going to a museum the Wild Center had partnered with and would have brought 30 museum educators to the Adirondacks for a retreat this summer to learn from educators at the Wild Center. Ratcliffe said earning this grant showed that the Wild Center is a “leader” in the natural science museum field. But the retreat has now been cancelled.

Catania said they had been thrilled to get the $250,000 Museums of America grant for exhibits in Trudeau’s former home, where the pioneering tuberculosis doctor lived for many years. It is rare for such a small museum to get one of these grants, but they had leveraged smaller state and federal grants in their application and got the award — at least, 56.2% of it.

If HSL is not able to get the rest of the money released, it’d be on the hook for the rest of the exhibit cost. Catania said the museum has $650,000 for exhibits still, but the potential loss of the $109,000 would put a big 10% hole in their $1 million budget for exhibits. She said they are going to meet with their design team to plan for the future. She said they might install the exhibits in phases, which would take longer than anticipated. The plan had been to produce the exhibits in the coming fall.

HSL is still actively fundraising for these projects.

“We intend to honor our contracts with our design teams,” Catania said.

She said it’s “dispiriting” to have the federal government not guaranteeing to honor its contract with HSL.

HSL has been supported by IMLS grants since 2018.

It regularly receives two-year grants of $50,000 to support its operations and collections. These grants fund preservation plans, maintaining their collections, rehousing, cataloguing, consultation with experts in making exhibits and making artifacts and documents available to the public.

“We have very cool collections, some of which had never seen the light of day — in multiple ways,” Monks-Kelly said.

In 2019, HSL took on an image cataloging project funded by grants from IMLS and the Northern New York Library Network to digitize its archival photos, memorabilia, letters and records. The collection can be found at hub.catalogit.app/12392 and has nearly 5,000 items online. Monks-Kelly said it takes a lot of time to document, scan, describe and catalogue each one.

An American Rescue Plan Act grant allowed the museum to hire Museum Specialist Emily Banach and IMLS grants have allowed them to keep her on staff.

“Most small museums in small towns don’t have professional collections staff. We have two people with Master’s in library science,” Catania said.

They spend lots of time organizing. An artifact like a photo can’t just be floating in a box — it needs to be catalogued to be findable. They are doing that with decades of documents for an entire town.

Monks-Kelly said the IMLS grants fund a lot of the museum’s public-facing work, which is important when it comes time to seek other grants or donations.