Grants with a loyalty clause by Virginia Robertson

A library once stretched a thin budget to run a Wi-Fi hotspot so children could download homework from the parking lot. A children’s museum dreamed of expanding a Little Science Lab where curiosity was allowed to be messy and loud. A WWI museum sat on boxes of letters and maps, fragile paper waiting to be digitized before time erased it. These were not ideological projects. They were civic ones. They were funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a modest federal agency most Americans have never heard of and until recently, never needed to worry about.

Now the agency is accepting applications for its 2026 grant cycle with an unfamiliar caveat. Applicants are “particularly welcomed,” according to cover letters, if their projects align with President Donald Trump’s vision for America. That single sentence should make anyone who cares about education, science or cultural memory pause. Not because presidents don’t have visions but because libraries and museums have traditionally been the places where visions are tested, debated and sometimes disproven.

This is how politicization actually works. It rarely arrives with a marching band. It comes as fine print. It comes as a suggestion that some ideas will travel faster through the system than others. When funding becomes contingent on ideological alignment, education and science stop being shared public goods and start behaving like loyalty tests.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services was nearly dismantled last year. The attempt failed but the message landed. Survival now appears to depend on usefulness to power. The result is a soft but potent form of pressure. Librarians, curators and educators are not being told what to teach outright. They are being nudged toward what is safe to propose. Over time, nudges shape landscapes.

Consider what gets quietly discouraged. A science lab that emphasizes climate literacy might suddenly sound “controversial.” A reading program that highlights immigrant stories might feel risky. A digitization project that surfaces uncomfortable chapters of American history may be deemed insufficiently aligned with a preferred narrative. No ban is necessary. Self-censorship does the work more efficiently.

Supporters will argue that every administration has priorities and public money should reflect them. That is true, to a point. But there is a difference between setting broad goals and narrowing the acceptable boundaries of inquiry. Libraries and museums are not campaign offices. Their value lies precisely in their resistance to the mood of the moment. They exist to outlast administrations, not flatter them.

What makes this shift especially troubling is where it lands. Rural libraries, small museums, underfunded community spaces depend disproportionately on federal grants. They do not have private donors waiting in the wings. When these institutions adjust their missions to fit political expectations, entire communities feel it. Children read fewer kinds of stories. Students ask fewer kinds of questions. History becomes smoother, cleaner, and less honest.

This is not just about Trump, despite the language invoking his vision. It is about a precedent. Once alignment becomes a criterion, it will be reused, reinterpreted and sharpened by whoever comes next. Today it might be nationalism. Tomorrow it could be something else. The mechanism will already be in place.

Education and science thrive on friction. They advance when assumptions are challenged and when discomfort is allowed to sit in the room. Turning them into instruments of ideological comfort weakens them. Worse, it teaches young people that knowledge is something granted by authority rather than discovered through effort.

A library offering free Wi-Fi is not making a political statement. A children’s museum encouraging experimentation is not waging a culture war. A World War I archive is not threatening national identity. These institutions are doing the slow, unglamorous work of keeping a society literate, curious and grounded in reality.

When funding starts asking for fealty instead of merit, the loss is not abstract. It is fewer books opened, fewer questions asked, fewer truths preserved. That is not a vision for America. It is a narrowing of it.

The danger is not loud authoritarianism but quiet erosion. It happens while people are busy, budgets are tight, and applications are due. By the time anyone notices, the boundaries have shifted. Defending institutional independence is not radical. It is conservative in the best sense, preserving spaces where learning is free from ideological tolls. If those spaces fall, rebuilding them will cost far more than any grant ever saved. And the damage will linger across generations after politics moves on.