Summary
The Trump administration abruptly cut funding to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides over $160 million annually to U.S. libraries. Elon Musk’s DOGE teams executed the cuts, immediately terminating dozens of state library grants.
Officials in California, Connecticut, and Washington were first notified, affecting programs that support rural and underserved communities.
Library leaders call the move “devastating.” Congressional Democrats and publishers condemned the decision, warning it could cause mass library closures.
I don’t believe that this is a particularly dramatic change. DOGE just cuts federal stuff. If a state wants to run a library on state funding, it can.
The real issue with DOGE cuts comes up when they’re cutting something at the federal level that needs to happen at the federal level, where doing it at the state level either would be problematic or is not within the scope of state authority, because then there’s no real alternative.
The problem is that you’re going to take the US back to the early 20th century, where there was a very large disparity in quality of life within the country. If these cuts are maintained, I won’t be surprised if some of the poorest American states become poorer than some Mexican states.
It’s going to be a pretty dramatic change for anyone depending on services that are cut.
States don’t have unlimited money.
Neither does the federal government. Washington State has the seventh-highest per capita income in the US. The great bulk of poor states vote Republican, so any negative funding impact is most likely primarily whacking the people who are furiously insisting that Trump be in office.
Not to mention that this program is apparently aimed at rural areas, which also vote more Republican.
My library will probably be ok, because we believe in funding such things. The problem is some states won’t, yet their residents still deserve access to knowledge.
Sort of like shutting down department of education. My state will still likely have the best education system, but all those places with struggling school systems, rampant racism and sexism, sports over education, will sink even lower
If we want any hope of moving forward, any hope of “making America great again” we need to start with a basic access to knowledge and education for everyone but Turnip is cutting programs that at least set the low bar
I would suspect (just theorizing) you will see southern states and the more MAGA happy ones do exactly that.
Knowledge of any sort is seen as an affront to these people. Couples that libraries often present books that share different ideas.
This just a domino in a long line of domino’s. They’ve now cut forever chemical bans, water quality requirements, medical research funding, housing for low incoming families funds, pulled critical vaccine research, and more. That’s just off the top of my head. At this point, what is the benefit of being a part of the Union? There needs to be a net benefit for us to continue existing within the larger U.S. system.
It’s starting to seem like these people are trying to speed run a U.S. break-up ala Soviet Union back in the 90s.