The White House has fired members of an outside advisory group to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the latest effort to bring the agency in line with President Trump’s priorities.
The firings were made in an email sent Wednesday morning to members of the National Council on the Humanities by Mary Sprowls, a staff member at the White House’s Office of Presidential Personnel.
“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Council on the Humanities is terminated, effective immediately,” she wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “Thank you for your service.”
The council, whose members typically include 26 private citizens drawn mostly from the scholarly world, meets several times a year to advise the endowment’s chair on grants, as well as on ways to promote and strengthen the humanities more generally.
It was not immediately clear how many members, all of whom were confirmed by the Senate, were dismissed. The endowment’s website currently lists just four members, all appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The endowment itself is currently closed because of the government shutdown.
The firings appear to be the latest move by the White House to tighten control over the endowment, which Mr. Trump repeatedly called to shutter in his first term. In February, the previous chairman, Shelly C. Lowe, a Biden appointee, resigned at Mr. Trump’s direction. In April, the endowment abruptly canceled most existing grants, citing plans to redirect the agency to furthering “the president’s agenda.” It also moved to terminate more than half the agency’s staff of about 180.
Since then, the agency has taken steps to help create the National Garden of American Heroes, a planned patriotic sculpture garden that Mr. Trump proposed in his first term. In August, it announced $34.8 million in new grants, including many for projects connected with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year.
Last month, the agency separately announced a $10.4 million grant, which it described as the largest in its history, to Tikvah, an educational group with connections in conservative political circles, to support a three-year effort to develop a curriculum in Jewish history and civilization. In a news release, Michael McDonald, the agency’s acting chairman, said the program would help counter “the sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses and streets,” which he said were also “attacks on the very foundations that have made the United States the exceptional nation that it is.”
Deborah Coen, a historian of science at Yale who was appointed to the council in 2022 by President Biden, said the email firing her had come entirely out of the blue. She said she had recently been asked to go through background checks for a renewal of her term. And even after receiving the termination email, she got communications from staff members at the endowment about a meeting next week to review grants.
“It looks like the folks organizing the meeting don’t know that I am no longer a member,” she said.
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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