Notebook: (1) Dismantling the Ideas Infrastructure

Attacks in the last ten weeks on how we create, nurture, share, and preserve ideas

Jack Boucher, Interior of classroom (1974). South Pass City, Fremont County, Wyoming. Library of Congress

I have probably thought more about the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) than most people who aren’t librarians or museum personnel. The IMLS is the only federal agency that provides funds to public libraries: successive Republican administrations and conservative policy blueprints have called for eliminating it, but it always survived (like the Department of Education and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities) because of broad bipartisan support and the wishes of local constituents for the ongoing life of their own libraries, arts projects, and schools. On March 14, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the elimination of the IMLS to “the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” and he replaced its head with the already-serving Deputy Secretary of Labor, who appeared on March 20 at the IMLS offices in the company of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to begin their efficiencies. Speaking of efficiency, IMLS grants total about $266 million, less than .004 percent of the federal budget, and serve 1.2 billion people. Executive director of the Association of Research Libraries Andrew Pace told Publishers Weekly, “nothing is more efficient than the way libraries and museums can scale access to knowledge and culture in their communities with what amounts to a very small investment by the federal government.” Library advocate John Chrastka said, “libraries are fundamentally Constitutional organizations that support every American without fear or favor. That is something that the administration could learn from.”

In January of 2019, when the IMLS survived a government shutdown, I wrote about its durable popularity and how thin American federal supports for books and reading are compared with those of other countries; in January of 2021 I wrote about how IMLS funding had again survived (even increased!) after President Trump’s effort to remove it from the budget that year, and the importance of libraries as “second responders” in times of crisis; in July of 2021, in the midst of the debate over the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, I wrote about libraries as intellectual infrastructure, both in the immediate sense of the urgent need to implement universal broadband (John Chrastka called the news of kids doing their remote schoolwork in library parking lots “a local hero story but also a national tragedy”) and the broader sense of shared resource that lifts individual endeavor; and last November I wrote about the likely consequences for our library system of the 2024 election, now being realized. I did not predict how President Trump and his DOGE “efficiency” project would so quickly overcome popular resistance to defunding libraries and federal arts institutions.