For a fourth straight year, the Trump administration has once again proposed the permanent elimination of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and with it virtually all federal funding for libraries, according to Andrew Albanese from Publishers Weekly… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The Trump Administration’s $4.875 trillion fiscal year 2021 budget blueprint, dubbed “A Budget for America’s Future,” proposes to boost defense, Veterans Affairs, and NASA, with steep proposed cuts to social programs including Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the State Department, foreign aid, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The proposal also lays out a path, including a sequestration order, to trim the annual budget deficit, which has exploded under the Trump Administration and is projected to top $1 trillion for FY2020.

In a statement, IMLS officials confirmed the Trump Administration will once again propose the elimination of the agency, with $23 million reportedly proposed in the 2021 budget proposal to wind the agency down.

Also for the fourth straight year, the Trump administration has proposed the elimination the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The White House has requested that Congress appropriate $33.4 million to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for the orderly closure of the agency,” reads a statement on the NEH web site, although NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede said the agency is “continuing normal operations and will announce our latest round of FY2020 awards this spring.”

The good news for library supporters: for the last three years, the library community has not only successfully countered the administration’s proposal to axe the IMLS—the agency through which most federal library funding is distributed in the form of grants to states— but IMLS has actually seen increases in each of the last three years. The FY2020 budget, which Trump signed in January, included a $10 million increase to the IMLS budget, including $6.2 million for the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), the largest increase in LSTA funding in over a decade.

“ALA takes the White House proposal seriously,” ALA president Wanda Brown said in a statement. “After three years of consistent pushback from library advocates and Congress itself, the administration still has not gotten the message: eliminating federal funding for libraries is to forego opportunities to serve veterans, upskill underemployed Americans, start and grow small businesses, teach our kids to read, and give greater access to people with print disabilities in our communities.”

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