Brad Richardson, executive director of the Clark County Historical Museum, in an exhibit room Tuesday, April 8, 2025. The museum is one of many in the region bracing for funding cuts from the National Endowment for the Humanities via Humanities Washington.
Erik Neumann / OPB
Museums and libraries including the Cowlitz County Historical Museum and Vancouver’s Historic Trust are among the latest group of nonprofits feeling the squeeze of federal funding cuts under the Trump administration. Many such cultural institutions rely on programming and grants from Humanities Washington, which is in turn funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The federal arts and culture agency received notice on April 2 that hundreds of agreed upon grants would be rescinded.
A student oral history project with Clark County residents, youth literacy programs at Vancouver elementary schools, and an apprenticeship program to preserve Northwest cultural traditions. Those are just a few programs supported by Humanities Washington, whose funding has been stopped in the name of government efficiency.
“Those types of exhibits, the types of programs that we’re able to do, they evaporate without Humanities Washington,” said Brad Richardson, the executive director of the Clark County Historical Museum, which relies on Humanities Washington to produce local lectures and to pay for grant-funded history projects.
“This isn’t future money that’s down the pipeline, this is funding that had already been granted, already awarded,” Richardson said. “They have cut the spigot off immediately for Humanities Washington without any time.”
The Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash., Tuesday, April 8, 2025. The museum is one of many in the region bracing for funding cuts from the National Endowment for the Humanities via Humanities Washington.
Erik Neumann / OPB
The Vancouver history museum draws heavily on Humanities Washington’s speakers program, which pays lecturers and gives local nonprofits the ability to enlist them for events.
In March the museum hosted “Big Apples, Big Business: How Washington Became the Apple State.” On Friday it presented “They Want Our Rhythm, But Not Our Blues: African American Innovation Through Pop Culture.”
Richardson now worries that could be its last such event, even though it has planned more at downtown Vancouver’s Kiggins Theater and at the Battle Ground Event Center. Besides entertainment, the speaker events serve as fundraising and membership opportunities.
The centerpiece of the museum’s gallery is currently an oral history project featuring conversations between students from Vancouver’s Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and prominent Clark County residents. The exhibit was an extension of a Humanities Washington grant.
The cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities are one of the latest efforts by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to shrink spending by the federal government.
The National Endowment for the Humanities granted $15.5 million to Washington state from 2019-2023, with funds going to universities, museums, Native American tribes and cultural nonprofits across the state, according to its website.
The NEH’s 2024 budget under the Biden administration was $211 million. The cuts in Washington are mirrored at state humanities councils across the country, which have been in a state of panic since the start of April.
“Us in the nonprofit and government sectors do this because we care,” Richardson said. “I work here at this museum not because it’s a job but because it’s the community I grew up in.”
He worries the NEH cuts will lead to future degradation of nonprofits like his if people choose not to pursue work in the cultural sector.
“It’s something you can’t quantify and it’s something you can never prove, but it’s going to be a loss,” he said.
