PROVIDENCE – Attorney General Peter F. Neronha has secured a permanent injunction against federal funding cuts to libraries and museums, but for the Providence Public Library, it's a temporary victory.
“The [injunction] is a great win for sure, but nobody feels like they can take a breath,” said Beth Plummer-Ricci, library director of external relations. “As long as this administration is in place, all that funding for next year is not secure, so we’re bracing for that.”
While the Department of Governmental Efficiency is no more, the uncertainty and damage left in its wake is ongoing, as funding opportunities and timelines face heavy disruption.
“It has caused all sorts of fear because people don’t know where their funding comes from,” Plummer-Ricci said.
While the majority of the library's federal funding comes through the R.I. Department of Education, it is supplemented by competitive grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and National Endowment for the Humanities.
The injunction protects funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services but with the agency running on a skeleton crew, nonprofits across the country may face serious gaps in their funding as the entire process is slowed down.
This past spring, the library received an abrupt cancellation letter withholding the remaining $50,000 of a larger National Leadership grant from IMLS.
National leadership grants are reimbursement – “you do the work and then submit a quarterly reimbursement request,” Plummer-Ricci explained. “We had already put resources, staff time into that program.”
The loss of such grants can put an organization deep in the red. Fortunately, thanks to pro bono help from the Rhode Island Lawyers Association, the library was able to recapture the money, “but it was quite a process to get the funding that [was] committed to us three years ago,” Plummer-Ricci said.
Besides having earmarked funds withheld, further funding opportunities are being canceled altogether. With the chaos at the federal level, agencies are not putting out their usual funding opportunities, Plummer-Ricci said. The national leadership grant applications usually go out in the fall, but the library has yet to hear about it.
“Now what happens next year? This is funding that we have received year after year,” said Tonia Mason, library marketing director.
It already resulted in
staff cuts earlier this year. The loss of more than $100,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in April led to the layoffs of grant-funded positions for the National Digital Newspaper program, which digitizes historic newspapers for the Library of Congress, a project the library had been involved in since 2019.
Although the library was approved for the next stage of the program and the attendant funding in August, it was only informed of that news and received the necessary documentation on Monday.
Plummer-Ricci hopes this means those same staff members can be reinstated, but this disruption has become the new normal.
“These processes used to be [as] reliable as clockwork," she said. "You would get the documentation with clear start dates. Now, you never know when you can count on things.”
With a grant of $321,242 over two years, the program can go forward now, but staff members have still faced a significant gap in income, Mason said.
The uncertainty trickles down to the state level, affecting money from the R.I. Department of Education that was earmarked for the library’s youth and adult education programs.
“So if the national department of education is getting dismantled federally, where is the money that we apply to RIDE for?” Mason said. “We see the state currently holding on to all this money and making different decisions based on the fact that they’re probably not going to have this money next year.”
The free programs provide access to learning skills for those who could not afford to attend similar classes, allowing participants to move up the career ladder.
“These education programs have proven results; we do these grants all the time, so we have to do reports that go with them so we know that they are successful,” Mason said, adding which means funding cuts for programs such as these affect not only the library but community advancement as a whole. “We’re not certain just what the impact is.”
(UPDATE: Corrects funding sources in 5th paragraph, cancelation National Leadership grant in 7th paragraph)
Veer Mudambi is the special projects editor of the Providence Business News. He can be reached at mudambi@pbn.com.
