President loses a battle in his war on libraries

On March 14, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order No. 14238 declaring the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and six other federal agencies, “unnecessary.” The order required each of the seven agencies to eliminate all non-statutory functions immediately to the maximum extent allowed by law, submit compliance reports within seven days, and reduce staffing accordingly.² The entire IMLS staff was placed on administrative leave. The acting director, Keith Sonderling, began canceling grants and contracts. The Board was fired. Congress had appropriated $294.8 million to IMLS for fiscal year 2025, the day after the executive order was signed. The funding just sat and the agency stood empty.³

One year later, Trump’s blatant act of civic destruction was overturned. On April 9, 2026, the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) announced a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice ending the implementation of the executive order. All canceled grants were restored. All fired staff were reinstated. The administration was legally barred from taking further steps to dismantle IMLS. Most of the reporting that week called it a win. What the headlines did not say is that the war began more than a year before, that it extended far beyond this single agency, and that this settlement did not end it.¹

IMLS was founded by Congress in 1996 with the mission to "advance, support, and empower America's museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development." It was reauthorized four times with bipartisan support. It was signed into law a second time by Trump himself in 2018, when the Senate passed reauthorization unanimously.⁴ None of that was sufficient against the force of Project 2025, which asserted maximum presidential authority in a flood of executive orders.

The lawsuits against the executive branch came quickly and in parallel. On April 4, 2025, 21 state attorneys general filed Rhode Island v. Trump in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, arguing that the executive order violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the Appropriations Clause, and the constitutional separation of powers.⁵ Three days later, the American Library Association and AFSCME filed ALA v. Sonderling in Washington, represented by Democracy Forward and Gair Gallo Eberhard LLP, asking a federal court to block the dismantlement outright.⁶

The Rhode Island case moved faster. On May 6, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. issued a preliminary injunction, finding that the administration had acted without proper procedures, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and the Take Care Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article II, Section 3), which mandates the “faithful execution” of federal law. The order was blunt: agency defendants were enjoined from implementing the executive order, full stop.⁷ The administration appealed. In September, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied the government’s motion for a stay, finding that it had failed to show a likelihood of success on the merits.⁸ In November, the district court made the injunction permanent on summary judgment. In April 2026, the administration dropped its appeal rather than defend the executive order before the court a second time. Three days later, the settlement followed.⁹

The ALA case had a rougher road. In June 2025, Judge Richard J. Leon declined to grant a preliminary injunction in ALA v. Sonderling, finding that the plaintiffs had not yet established a substantial likelihood of success. His opinion did not close the door; it noted that the case raised quintessentially contractual issues and sent the parties back to brief the merits.¹⁰ They did. The settlement reached in April 2026 rendered the merits argument moot. Democracy Forward’s Skye Perryman called the outcome “proof that litigation works.” The courts had ruled that the executive branch cannot simply abolish what Congress has built.

The ALA sent a letter to IMLS acting director Sonderling on the day after the executive order was signed, warning against cutting any programs that Congress had protected by law. They did not wait to see how far the administration intended to go. They assumed the worst and acted.

IMLS was not the only institution the administration targeted. It was one node in a coordinated campaign against the places where a democracy preserves its memory.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the custodian of the nation’s official record, was one of the first to fall to partisan control. On February 7, 2025, Trump fired Colleen Shogan, the first woman to serve as Archivist of the United States, without providing Congress the reasons federal law requires.¹¹ Her deputy chose to retire. In his place came Jim Byron, a political hack previously associated with the Richard Nixon Foundation—not an academic, not an archivist, but someone chosen to manage history rather than preserve it. Staff viewed his arrival as a hostile takeover. “We're very worried about what it means for [them] to have access to actual physical records," said a staffer. The agency has since lost roughly ninety positions, including the entire Office of Innovation, and the division that supports presidential libraries.¹²

The 13 presidential libraries under NARA’s management are themselves under pressure. When the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired probationary employees, a term describing workers not yet past their first year of federal government employment, in February 2025, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston was forced to close.¹³ The Eisenhower Library in Kansas and the Truman Library in Missouri absorbed similar cuts. These facilities are not trophy rooms, they preserve the details of how America makes its decisions, its history. When our ability to maintain our history is gone, the record is not necessarily destroyed–it may simply become inaccessible, which has the same effect.

By April 2026, the assault on NARA had taken an even more troubling shape. The American Historical Association (AHA) filed suit after the administration’s Department of Justice issued a memo asserting that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional.¹⁴ The Act, passed in the wake of Watergate, requires presidents and their staffs to preserve White House records and transfer them to the National Archives at the end of their terms. The historians sought emergency court relief. A hearing is scheduled for May 5, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

Archives are where civilizations keep the evidence. Census records, shipping logs, tax receipts, the correspondence of presidents. These are not souvenirs. This is the stuff that underpins history. Partisan control of a nation's archive must be read as an intent to rewrite the past, and control the narrative of the present.

The campaign touched every major federal cultural institution. The administration moved to fire the leadership of the National Portrait Gallery and directed the Smithsonian Institution to review its exhibits for content alignment.¹⁵ It attempted to fire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) board members and embed a DOGE team to defund public radio and television. It ousted the leadership of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, which, it bears repeating, is the Library of Congress. And the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) saw DOGE try to claw back $175 million in grants already awarded to humanities councils, archives, libraries, and media outlets leaving those entities deprived of oxygen.¹⁷

The ideological architecture behind these actions resides in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy document. It calls for eliminating IMLS, NEH, and NEA. Russell Vought, Project 2025 co-author now serving as director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, is a named defendant in both IMLS lawsuits.¹⁸ The first Trump administration proposed eliminating these agencies in every one of its four budget requests. Congress refused each time, on a bipartisan basis.¹⁹ The second term arrived with a different theory of how to proceed. A budget request requires a vote. An executive order does not. That legal challenges would question this extended grab of authority did not slow them down. The idea was to move fast and break things. 

EveryLibrary, the lobbying group for library advocacy, mobilized more than 250,000 Americans to contact Congress in 2025, connecting federal threats to local consequences: when federal money stopped, the after-school programs were cut, the rural interlibrary loan networks darkened, the e-book databases vanished from state library systems.²⁰ Congress listened. The fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills maintained most funding for IMLS, the Library of Congress, and NARA—a direct rejection of the administration’s preferred cuts.²¹ The Data Rescue Project, maintained by a consortium of three data organizations, coordinated emergency preservation of federal internet content and data being removed or altered, building an archive outside the reach of the executive branch. Internet Archive, the largest non-governmental digital document database in the world, stepped up its vigilance.²²

Colleen Shogan did not go quietly. On Constitution Day 2025, the fired archivist launched More Perfect, a national bipartisan civics initiative. In interviews she explained what was being lost and why it matters: “All of these institutions are charged with preserving our nation’s history and sharing it with all Americans,” she told PBS NewsHour. “The only way they can continue to be successful in their mission is if they remain independent.”²³

The settlement of ALA v. Sonderling is a significant legal victory for the American public. Yet, the clouds have not yet parted.  The administration’s proposed FY2027 budget eliminates IMLS entirely through the congressional appropriations process, which is the one mechanism the courts cannot touch.²⁴ The Presidential Records Act litigation is unresolved. NARA remains under political management with no permanent archivist and no permanent Librarian of Congress. 

In an article published in March 2026, Newsjunkie lamented the decline of the free press in modern Hong Kong. Our story featured the archival edition of the June 4, 1989, South China Morning Post newspaper–the issue that covered the massacre at Tiananmen Square. The front page carried a photograph of bodies on the ground and a headline that fixed responsibility onto the Chinese government. It showed readers what had happened because the Hong Kong press could still do what the mainland press could not: witness and preserve the names of the dead against the demands of official amnesia. That capacity did not survive.²⁵ 

Here in the United States the free press and the institutions of knowledge are battered but standing. It is not certain they will remain so.

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