On Friday, May 2nd, 2025, DOGE and the National Endowment for the Arts terminated $300,000 worth of grants for 51 publishers. The email, a copy and paste job, trickled into inboxes at odd hours. 5:45pm. 9pm. 10:02pm. The stated reason for termination: the work did not fit with the President’s “new priorities.”
Article continues after advertisement
Congress had already approved 2025’s NEA budget, so the retractions were pretty clearly illegal. They were certainly a strange form of political spite: why target independent publishing? If most readers are hazy on the difference between the conglomerated Big Five and everyone else, then it’s certain that Elon Musk and his cronies know even less. Not to mention, in the grand scheme of this year’s 5.35 trillion-dollar federal budget, $300,000 is chump change, a rounding error. But for the 51 publishers, losing their NEA grants has material downstream consequences: fewer books, by fewer writers, reaching fewer readers.
On behalf of several authors and scholars, the Authors Guild sued the National Endowment for the Humanities. On July 24th, New York Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that DOGE and the National Endowment for the Humanities had violated the grantees’ First Amendment rights as well as federal law.
For the 51 publishers, it’s a symbolic victory. A literal victory would be nice too, but symbolism matters, and precedent really matters. The Authors Guild did not represent independent publishers, but the justice of their cause.
Considering the political climate, it’s also an important second opportunity for small and independent publishers to step into the spotlight and find their supporters. That’s not to say that readers don’t read small press books, so much as they don’t know they’re reading small press books, and considering the tight grip that the conglomerates have on media and distribution, the indies fight an uphill battle. And yet—they succeed.
One press that lost their NEA funding this year was Hub City out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Their 2020 word-of-mouth hit, The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels, has about 7,000 reviews on Goodreads. Five years after publication, it still sits face-out on the shelf at my local New York City library, right across from the circulation desk. When I flipped to the front matter, I saw that it, too, was funded with NEA money.
The message from the federal government’s stance is that it fundamentally opposes American arts.
Where a book comes from, or how it’s funded, is fairly opaque. But like with The Prettiest Star, a tender and agonizing family saga about a young man with AIDS who goes home to die, the NEA money has been doing what it should: bringing readers books they will love. Now, the message from the federal government’s stance is that it fundamentally opposes American arts. What the NEA grantees made or planned to make with their funds is irrelevant; it’s that they were creating and sharing literature at all.
Independent publishers are canny, resilient actors, not fragile victims. For the editors brave enough to speak out, the news item about them became a hook to share their message.
Deep Vellum from Dallas, Texas showed particular gumption. Their $20,000 NEA grant was meant to support four out of the sixty books they’re publishing in 2025, including a thousand-page novel translated from German into English. (Schattenfroh will be released this month.) When news of the NEA cancellations broke, founder Will Evans seized the moment, sharing Deep Vellum’s mission with any journalist who showed interest. He gave interviews and wrote an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News.
“The media attention was amazing. We got more than $20,000 in media hits for sure,” he told me. Still, he had some objections with how the press framed their story: “The headlines are like, ‘Deep Vellum loses NEA grant.’ That’s kind of a loser headline. ‘They’re not winning, they’re losing.’” He wants readers to recognize that actually, the story is an exciting one: “Deep Vellum is an organization that gets NEA grants.”
Getting NEA grants still matters, even when the story is that the government yanked the money away. For most publishers, the grants are not generous enough to sustain an entire catalog, especially when compared to how tedious and time-consuming the application process is. The money matters because it puts more gas in a small team’s tank, but also it waves a green flag, signaling that the press A) releases excellent work, and B) is stable enough to invest in. For every dollar from the NEA, a press can expect about seven dollars from other, more open-handed donors
Evans’s attitude was characteristic of the editors I spoke with. The NEA retractions were a blow, but not fatal.
The NEA sent a follow-up message on June 26th, letting publishers know that they would be allowed to take their grant money anyway, so long as they “incurred sufficient, approved, allowable, and allocable federal costs” and submitted the paperwork by July 31st. Five days to jump through the hoops and get the money.
To my mind, this is the most disturbing part of the retractions saga: the chaos, uncertainty, disrespect, and bullying, devoid of any underlying moral or philosophical reasoning. Just jabbing people in the eye with a stick for the pleasure of it.
I’m proud of independent publishers for keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of politically motivated resentment, but unfortunately, their work is going to get even more difficult. Even as Judge MacMahon ruled in favor of the Authors Guild and the writers it represents, the federal government dealt small press books a more effective, more subtle blow—and one that abides by the rule of law.
Independent literature will survive but that doesn’t mean the NEA chaos and its aftermath has not exacted a high cost.
On July 16th, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) learned that they would receive no NEA funding. CLMP is not a publisher but a support organization. Their work is essential, but unsexy. When an important distributor for small presses closed overnight in March 2024, they provided emergency grants for publishers to get their stock back and find new distribution. During the swirl of NEA grant retractions, they gathered and shared information, which was hard to come by after DOGE fired four of the NEA’s literary arts employees.
When I reached out to CLMP’s Executive Director Mary Gannon, she had this to say:
CLMP, whose mission is to support these [independent] publishers, was established with funding from the NEA in 1967. On July 16, we were informed, for the first time since our inception, that we will not be receiving funding. It’s hard not to wonder why. . . . We will survive this. But the path forward remains unclear, and the broader implications for literary culture are profound.
Choosing not to fund CLMP is legal, effective, and not likely to make the news. When the next crisis arrives for small publishers, CLMP’s resources will be less.
Independent literature will survive, as CLMP will survive, but that doesn’t mean the NEA chaos and its aftermath has not exacted a high cost. The retractions have mostly been discussed in political terms, but it’s a moral failing above all else.
Books shape our psyches and our souls. America’s collective conscience is hardened against books because we’ve failed to love them as we should have, and we’ve allowed the Trump administration to turn them into political footballs. Books are the most important artistic expressions of our moment, and the most meaningful artifacts we leave behind. Whatever we do, books will endure; but for our own sake, we should treat them with reverence.
Ideally, we would have an NEA that was functional, reliable, and well-funded. We don’t. Next year is America’s 250th. I don’t know what will happen with the NEA. Probably no one does. But I do know that it’s very American, in the best possible way, to transform kitchen scraps into a meal fit for a king, then turn around and feed it to the neighbors instead. That’s what the NEA grantees did and still do. The news cycle moved on, but they’ve continued to pursue their calling: bringing us beautiful literature, despite the odds. We should help them.