What Does Eliminating the IMLS Really Mean? A Structural Question for U.S. Culture

This is not the first time the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has found itself at the heart of a political storm. But the recent executive order signed by President Donald Trump — under the title “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” — goes beyond symbolic gesture or anti-centralist rhetoric: it is a decision that could effectively dismantle one of the few federal agencies solely devoted to supporting cultural institutions across the United States.

To grasp the magnitude of this move, we must step back from the immediacy of headlines and take a structural view of the American cultural ecosystem — a complex system where market forces, private philanthropy, and public funding coexist in a delicate and often tense balance. Unlike other countries that maintain large Ministries of Culture, the U.S. model has historically delegated cultural policy to specialized agencies like the IMLS, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). These agencies derive their legitimacy from their decentralized and technical roles as funders and connectors.

Within this framework, the IMLS operates as the backbone of a national network of public libraries and community museums. Though its annual budget comprises just 0.0046% of federal spending, its grants have a profound impact in rural areas, public schools, and local cultural centers — spaces often overlooked by the media, yet essential to early cultural development, collective memory, and access to creative industries.

The executive order has provoked strong reactions from major institutions in the sector. The American Library Association (ALA) warned that the measure “jeopardizes one of the most trusted institutions in the United States,” while the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) stated that eliminating the IMLS “undermines the educational, economic, and community role of museums.” These are not defensive outbursts but thoughtful warnings from institutions that understand the real-world consequences of a policy that, in the name of downsizing government, risks dismantling an entire ecosystem.

Yet perhaps the more pressing question is not what role the State should play in cultural policy —an important but often repeated debate— but rather: what will cultural institutions and civil society do in the face of this dismantling? What is their real strength in society? Will they passively observe as the infrastructure that sustained cultural access for decades is quietly erased? Or will they emerge as political actors in their own right?

Do libraries, museums, and cultural centers have the ability to organize, to defend their public legitimacy beyond lobbying? Can they transform concern into strategy, and strategy into collective action?

Because to speak of the IMLS is not merely to speak of a federal agency. It is to speak of a society’s capacity to defend what it deems essential. What is at stake is not just a budget line — it is the level of awareness, or indifference, with which a nation upholds or lets vanish its symbolic spaces, its cultural rights, and its shared narrative.