Bureaucrats at the National Endowment for the Humanities cut checks to fund various liberal research projects as the Trump administration signaled its intention to cut diversity, equity, and inclusion-related grant spending, a Washington Examiner review of public records has found.
Many of the grant projects that NEH staffers silently funded weren’t slated to begin until much later in the Trump administration, suggesting that the payments may have been expedited to avoid looming cancellations.
Among the grants pushed out the door by the NEH were a research project concerning the “LBGTQ+” history of comic books, a text “examining strategies to nurture black self love and joy as empowerment for political struggle,” a “cultural history of Latina feminist writing,” and a book reflecting on how Mayan “human-nature-spirit relations” have been affected by climate change, among many other similarly left-of-center projects.
“One of the problems with DEI is that it can make grants intended to fund cultural initiatives, such as those related to the humanities, look as if the goal is to study, for example, Mayan ethics — which could be a worthwhile endeavor to a historian or philosopher — when the goal is actually to promote an intersectional political agenda and introduce a cultural mandate,” Capital Research Center director of communications Sarah Lee told the Washington Examiner. “The lines can get very blurry. But these NEH grants, pushed out the door before executive orders took effect restricting DEI-based federal funding, and in which NEH had to remove language like ‘promotion of discriminatory equity ideology’ from their notices of funding opportunities, certainly look suspiciously politicized.”
Working to appropriate funds swiftly to evade a hostile administration is an established strategy among bureaucrats. The Environmental Protection Agency under former President Joe Biden distributed hundreds of billions of dollars in government and private resources before President Donald Trump took office to prevent him from cancelling that funding.
The NEH payments were released between January and March of this year, before the agency announced in late April that it would implement the president’s executive order targeting DEI initiatives in the federal grantmaking process.
One project, for instance, involved the NEH paying an anonymous individual $60,000 to produce a book documenting how “LGBTQ+ artists … innovate[d] comics through grassroots forms” by “document[ing] LGBTQ+ life and activism in a moment when the community was facing government neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis and disregard for their civil liberties.” Through its grant funding, the NEH sought to help the anonymous author “excavate stories of vibrant queer communities to inspire a new generation at a time when LGBTQ+ people face renewed threats.”
While the project wasn’t slated to begin until January 2026, federal records show that the NEH disbursed the full $60,000 on Jan. 28, just over a week after Trump took office.
A similar story played out across a number of different NEH grants.
Examples include $60,000 paid out in late February to fund a project on the “cultural history of Latina feminist writing” scheduled to begin in July; an additional $60,000 paid out in March to fund work on “a book examining strategies to nurture black self love and joy as empowerment for political struggle” that was supposed to start in July 2026; $343,197 in March for a grant program to increase racial diversity in the “library preservation profession” slated to begin in September; $25,000 disbursed in February to support work in a book on “interpreting queer history and culture in central Illinois” that was set to begin production in March; and a slate of five-figure grants aimed at promoting “Arab and Muslim cultural awareness” that were paid out a few weeks before the programs associated with them began in April.
Many of these awards match the description of grants that the NEH said in April it would cease funding in accordance with the president’s orders.
“In collaboration with the Administration, NEH has cancelled awards that are at variance with agency priorities, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice, as well as awards that may not inspire public confidence in the use of taxpayer funds,” the agency’s April statement reads.
DEI-related grants that the NEH didn’t push out prior to implementing the president’s orders, however, could still end up being paid out.
On July 28, Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, whom former President Bill Clinton appointed, said that the president’s efforts to cut DEI-related NEH grants ran afoul of the First Amendment and ordered funds to be disbursed.
“The American story simply cannot be told by suppressing all conversation about such matters — including especially conversation about past injustices that some, perhaps many, of us would rather forget,” McMahon wrote. “But for well over two centuries Americans have shown, again and again, that we can take a hard look at ourselves without falling apart.”
Conservative critics have condemned judges for attempting to block the president’s spending cuts, characterizing them as unelected magistrates preventing the federal government from delivering on its mandate. Liberals, meanwhile, argue that the president does not have the absolute power to withhold public funds.
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“The Supreme Court already ruled that the Trump Administration could terminate federal funds dedicated to DEI,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Washington Examiner. “This is yet another example of the rogue judiciary — radical lower court judges are directly contradicting the rule of law by openly and actively defying the Supreme Court’s instructions. The Trump Administration will continue to lawfully abide by the Supreme Court’s rulings, will not allow openly unlawful court orders to stand, and looks forward to this court’s order being reversed on appeal.”
The NEH did not respond to a request for comment.