Four of the Big Five publishers—Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster—and Sourcebooks sent a letter to Congress on April 3 expressing “deep concern” over the state of the nation’s libraries following a week of unprecedented turmoil at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency responsible for distributing federal funding to libraries.
The letter, sent in advance of the American Library Association’s annual National Library Week, calls on Congress to “reject” the executive order signed by President Donald Trump on March 14 which called for the elimination of the IMLS “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” Since the order was issued, the Trump administration has installed a new acting director of the IMLS, deputy secretary of labor Keith Sonderling, who has put the institute’s entire staff on administrative leave against the wishes of its advisory board.
The letter comes on the same day that library advocacy nonprofit EveryLibrary announced, in a statement, that libraries across the country began receiving official notices from Sonderling terminating their grants, effective April 1. Those grants are funded by $294.8 million appropriated by Congress, a bipartisan group of four senators pointed out to the acting director in a March 26 memo, which was sent to “remind the Administration of its obligation to faithfully execute the provisions of the law as authorized”—an obligation that is now going unfulfilled.
“Terminating these grants appears to us to have exceeded the plain terms of the executive order; all of these grants are statutory obligations of the agency,” EveryLibrary wrote in its statement. Noting that one slashed program, Grants to States, “is the single largest source of federal library funding, distributing over $180 million annually to every state and territory library administrative agency,” EveryLibrary said that “The sudden termination of these grant agreements directly violates the agency’s legal responsibilities under federal law...and will create sudden, significant shortfalls in nearly every state library budget.”
In their own letter, the publishers asserted that “defunding libraries would result in mass closures and the destruction of a system that today benefits millions of Americans,” despite IMLS funding constituting “just 0.003% of the federal budget,” and called on Congress to reject the executive order to close IMLS and to restore its funding.
“Allowing the IMLS to be defunded, and thus to disappear, would leave millions of Americans without access to the books, tools, and other resources required to participate in the modern world,” the letter continued. “Shuttering IMLS would be an act of monumental neglect, violating the very foundation of America and what it stands for as a country. It would undermine the tenets of our democracy and our citizens’ right to read, think, and learn freely.”
Meanwhile, a post to the official official IMLS Instagram account on Thursday afternoon showed a series of graphics laying out what appeared to be line items from the organization’s budget, including “$6,700,000 to enhance equitable library programs” and “$1,500,000 for social justice programs.” Its caption read: “The era of using your taxpayer dollars to fund DEI grants is OVER.”
