The proposed elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agency that provides grant funding to libraries and museums across the country, would be felt in every part of Oregon.

On March 14, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), as well as six other federal agencies, “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”

On March 20, members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) entered IMLS’s offices in Washington, D.C., where they were met by IMLS staff dressed in funereal black.

“They didn’t expect to find the entire staff in the office working,” an anonymous IMLS staffer told ArtNet. “They pivoted quickly. They swore (Keith Sonderling) in and instead of laying everybody off immediately they left the building, because they didn’t want to create a scene with us there. Otherwise, they would have locked the doors and taken over our systems and sent a mass notification out to everyone.”

IMLS provides individual grants to libraries, museums, archives, and other institutions in all 50 states and territories. Through its Grants to States program, IMLS distributes $160 million in block grants to state libraries.

The effect on Oregon’s libraries would be large. Twenty-five percent of the State Library of Oregon’s budget, approximately $2.6 million, comes from IMLS. That is the equivalent of the budget of a midsized public library in Oregon, said Buzzy Nielsen, a program manager at the State Library. “Albany-ish,” he said.

As news broke about the executive order and DOGE’s visit, library and museum advocates quickly rallied. The American Library Association sent a letter to IMLS’s acting head outlining IMLS’s statutory requirements and quickly published an FAQ; EveryLibrary released a statement, as did the Association for Rural & Small Libraries 

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“There is no efficiency argument when IMLS represents just 0.0046% of the federal budget, while museums generate $50 billion in economic impact,” the American Alliance of Museum’s statement reads.

The executive order calls for eliminating the “non-statutory components and functions.” Within seven days, agency heads must explain “which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.”

According to the National Museum and Library Services Board, there are very few, if any, non-statutory functions.

On March 24, the board sent a letter to the agency’s acting head, Keith Sonderling, who also serves as the deputy secretary of the Department of Labor and has no background in library or museum services.   

“It is our considered determination,” the Board wrote, “that the Museum and Library Services Act of 2018, as codified in Title 20 of the U.S. Code, outlines specific statutory mandates that cannot be paused, reduced, or eliminated without violating Congressional intent and federal statute.”

The letter went on to state, “it is our considered advice that all current-year and multi-year grants, contracts, cooperative agreements, and awards …constitute statutory obligations.”

The State Library of Oregon uses the money it’s allotted by the federal IMLS for a huge variety of services and grant-funded projects.

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A portion of the $2.6 million from IMLS pays for two-thirds of the state agency’s Library Support division staff. The State Library provides consulting services to public, school, and academic librarians throughout the state. 

It also pays for statewide services that all libraries have access to. That includes the Statewide Database Licensing Program, which provides access to e-books and subsidized access to academic journals and other resources.

“The price we pay to license databases for all Oregonians is much cheaper than individual libraries paying to license themselves,” Nielsen said. “There is collective impact.”

The money from IMLS also pays for all public libraries to have access to iREAD Summer Reading Programs; the State Library’s 24/7 online chat reference service Answerland; the Northwest Digital Heritage collection, which aggregates digital collections from libraries, museums, and other institutions in the Pacific Northwest; Libros for Oregon; the enormously popular Oregon Battle of the Books, a trivia-style reading competition for Oregon schoolchildren; and a program that pays for teenagers to work as interns in libraries.

The State Library also uses IMLS funding to fund the Sage Library System and courier service, which shares the collections of 77 academic, public, school, and special libraries in 15 counties of eastern and central Oregon. 

The elimination of IMLS funding would cut the courier services’ budget in half, Nielsen said.

Each year, the State Library also awards competitive grants of up to $50,000 to Oregon’s public libraries.

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In 2024, the State Library awarded grants to 32 libraries. The money is used for everything from small pilot programs to creating bookmobiles, buying new laptops for community college students, buying wifi hot spots that library patrons can check out, and creating programs that teach informational literacy and digital literacy.

Recently, the Oregon Historical Society received a grant allowing the museum to translate material from the Yasui Family Papers, personal and historical documents that span five generations of a Japanese-American family living near the Hood River era, both before and after World War II.

“Anything a library can imagine under the auspices of library services,” Nielsen said, could potentially be funded by a competitive grant.

“We do a lot with 2.6 million dollars,” Nielsen said.

In 2012, Astoria’s public library received a small grant that paid for all children in Clatsop County, up to 19 years of age, to have a free library card.

Because the three public libraries in Clatsop County –– in Astoria, Seaside, and Warrenton –– are operated as city agencies, children living outside of the city limits of those cities had to pay for a library card.

Currently, 2,428 Clatsop County children have free library cards, according to Suzanne Harold, the director of Astoria’s public library. “Without that funding, we would have still have thousands of kids who wouldn’t have access,” she said.

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And, the grant had other cascading effects that no one at the time expected. In 2020 the Astoria, Seaside, and Warrenton libraries created the Northwest Library Cooperative. The libraries now share their collections among one another, allowing library patrons to check out and return materials to any of the three libraries.

Reading Outreach of Clatsop County, a 501c3 nonprofit, formed to help coordinate the summer reading program in Clatsop County, and partners with public libraries, school districts, and other organizations to promote literacy for all Clatstop County children.

“That’s a huge success story,” Nielsen said.

IMLS also provides grant funding to museums and other cultural institutions through its Museums for America program. Since 1997, when IMLS was created by Congress, the agency has awarded 370 grants to museums and other cultural institutions in Oregon.

Its Museums for America program has provided grants to museums throughout Oregon. In addition to larger institutions such as the Portland Art Museum, the World Forestry Center, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, the High Desert Museum, and the Oregon Coast Aquarium, grants have also been awarded to smaller institutions. Among them are the Museum of the Oregon Territory, Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, the Shelton McMurphey Johnson House, and the history museums in Benton, Coos, and Crook County. 

The proposed elimination of IMLS “is devastating,” Nielsen said. “It would have a lot of effects.”

Nielsen said that the State Library draws down its IMLS grant-funding every 30 days. “As far as we know, IMLS staff are still in place,” and “the funding that we get is going to continue,” Nielsen said. “We have not heard otherwise.”

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“We should be able to still access the money,” he said, but the State Library will not know with certainty until the next draw-down in early April.

IMLS was created by the Museums and Library Services Act, enacted by Congress in 1996 and reauthorized multiple times. Much of its programs and grant-funding is governed by the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act.

Since the agency’s programs are mandated by law, it is likely that any attempt at eliminating IMLS will result in legal challenges.

When commenting about any challenges the State Library may face in accessing its funding, Nielsen’s answer not only concerned how the State Library and Oregon’s public libraries and museums will be effected. He also evoked a more general experience of life in the United States under the current presidential administration:

“We just don’t know what is going to happen.”