Kelsey Ables

Ever since President Trump started playing armchair museum curator last year, the White House has employed a number of strategies to try to influence exhibitions at the Smithsonian. It has sent threatening letters, published a memo that reads like an exhibit hit list, and even resorted to an occasional bit of online trolling.

Winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and can require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no humanities experience yanked the funds of hundreds of grantees using little more than a chatbot and a haphazard search for terms such as BIPOC and gay, it stung.