Major humanities groups sue Trump administration over NEH grant cuts

The Trump administration’s mass cancellation of humanities grants ran into a hard constitutional limit: Congress controls the money, not DOGE. A federal judge ruled that the elimination of National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unlawful and unconstitutional, handing a major victory to scholarly groups that said the cuts had ripped through museums, archives, universities and local humanities programs nationwide.

The lawsuit was filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association on May 1, 2025. The groups said the NEH, created in 1965, had suspended entire divisions, launched the mass firing of 65 percent of its staff and halted grant programs. They also said the agency had awarded more than $6 billion over six decades, even though its current budget amounts to about one one-hundredth of one percent of the federal budget.

At the center of the case was the claim that the administration refused to distribute money Congress had already appropriated. The plaintiffs said that violated the separation of powers and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In their account, more than 1,000 previously awarded grants were terminated and grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars were canceled without statutory authority.

The legal fight deepened in March 2026, when discovery filings said DOGE used a flawed ChatGPT process to identify supposed DEI programs and that DOGE staff, not NEH officials, made the funding decisions. The plaintiffs said some grants were canceled even after NEH staff concluded they did not conflict with new Trump administration policies. They also said DOGE and NEH staff used Signal for official communications in violation of the Federal Records Act.

The ruling matters well beyond Washington. Humanities advocates warned that the cuts threatened historic preservation projects, K-12 education, public history and community partnerships in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The NEH funds work in every state and U.S. jurisdiction, supporting teachers, researchers, state humanities councils, libraries and local programs that often operate on thin margins but reach far into civic life.

The decision adds to earlier judicial pushback in related NEH litigation, including an order that funds be escrowed while the court considered whether the grants should be restored. That leaves the administration with a narrower path forward: it may try to rework the cuts through a lawful process, but the ruling undercuts the idea that DOGE or the White House can simply erase congressionally approved humanities support by fiat. For universities, archives and local cultural groups, the order is more than a courtroom rebuke. It is the first significant signal that the grant system can still be defended as a matter of constitutional power, not just budget policy.