The Department of Government Efficiency ordered the National Endowment for the Humanities to terminate the majority of its grant programs — threatening $1.7 million in federal funding to Penn.
On April 2, NEH select grant recipients were notified of the cuts in a series of emails, at the same time that a senior NEH official confirmed to NPR that around 80% of the agency’s staff were being placed on paid administrative leave. Penn currently has eight active NEH grants, covering a variety of research areas, including renovations to the Penn Museum, literature analysis for low resource languages, and artificial intelligence applications in archaeology.
The Daily Pennsylvanian could not determine at the time of publication whether Penn's funding has been affected by the recent federal action.
“Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities,” the letters read. “The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration, and due to exceptional circumstances, adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.”
In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, English professor James English called the decision an "assault on the entire higher educational structure." He characterized the funding cuts as "existential" and noted that they "certainly do not save the US government any money worth talking about."
"They want to bring down the universities, that’s what authoritarians do,” English said.
Director of the University of Pennsylvania Press Mary Francis similarly said that the NEH cuts would do little to help the government's budget and claimed that the federal government was making a "political point."
“[The NEH] is one of the smallest federal agencies, and the budget is not going to solve any deficit problems," Francis said. "Relative to almost anything you can name in the federal government, NEH has a tiny budget."
Francis said that the Penn Press currently has three NEH grants — each amounting to roughly $5,000 — that fund individual books and their cost of dissemination for open access digital editions. Though the grants are “small,” Francis said that the press would still be impacted "possibly very profoundly."
Francis also stated that the Penn Press has not yet received notice of termination of their grants.
The move comes as the Trump administration has cut and reduced grants awarded by several federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Last month, the Trump administration froze $175 million in grants to Penn, citing the University's failure to bar transgender athletes from women's athletics.
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