The Trump administration terminated two taxpayer-funded humanities grants worth a combined $120,000, one for a book about LGBTQ cartoonists, the other for a study of "multiethnic graphic literature." The grants were awarded in the final weeks of the Biden presidency and killed months later under new leadership at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The move is small in dollar terms. It is enormous in signal. The NEH is telling the academic establishment that the days of rubber-stamping identity-driven research on the public dime are over.
The first grant, $60,000, award number FEL-303013-25, went to University of Florida English professor Margaret Alice Galvan for a book called "Comics in Movement." The NEH award page describes a project that "examines how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s." It adds that "their comics have been largely forgotten."
Forgotten by whom? Apparently not by the Biden-era bureaucrats who signed the check.
The second grant, another $60,000, award number HB-302712-25, went to San José State University assistant professor Maite Urcaregui for a book titled "Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature." Fox News Digital reported that Urcaregui described her project as a plan to:
"analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors alongside contemporaneous visual archives and critical legal histories to underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions."
That is a lot of academic jargon. Translated: the federal government was paying a professor to argue that American citizenship is defined by "inconsistencies" and "exclusions." Taxpayers footed the bill.
The NEH told The College Fix that both grants "were awarded at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration, and terminated in April 2025." The agency followed up on April 24 with a public announcement laying out its new direction. Fox News reported the NEH pledged it had taken:
"programmatic steps to ensure that all future awards will, among other things, be merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country."
Merit-based. Pro-America. No extreme ideologies. Those three standards should not be controversial. The fact that they represent a dramatic policy shift tells you everything about what the NEH had become.
These two grants are a fraction of the broader overhaul. The Washington Post reported on April 7, 2025, that the NEH canceled over 1,200 grants following staffing and funding reductions tied to federal cost-cutting efforts. Breitbart reported that DOGE announced the cancellation of several Biden-era NEH grants and claimed $163 million in savings from that agency alone, with roughly $170 billion in total government-wide savings through contract cancellations, workforce reductions, and fraud detection.
DOGE wrote on social media: "During the previous administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the following grants to spend taxpayer dollars, all of which have been cancelled."
The administration's willingness to challenge entrenched spending mirrors its posture on other fronts, from clearing legal obstacles to deportation policy to drawing hard lines on legislative priorities. The pattern is consistent: identify waste, cut it, and dare the establishment to defend the indefensible.
Not everyone is on board. Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in July pausing the cancellation of certain NEH grants, citing First Amendment concerns. The legal fight is far from over.
Expect more challenges. The academic-industrial complex does not surrender funding without a courtroom brawl. But the administration has already proven it will act, and polls show the public backs Trump's willingness to make tough personnel and policy calls.
Fox News Digital requested comment from the NEH, Galvan, and Urcaregui. The grant recipients' silence speaks volumes. It is easy to write a dense abstract about "citizenship's inconsistencies" when a $60,000 check is attached. It is harder to explain to a welder in Ohio why his taxes paid for it.
The Biden administration treated the NEH like a slush fund for progressive academics. Grants sailed through without serious scrutiny, rewarding projects steeped in identity politics and dressed up in scholarly language. The Trump administration looked at the receipts and pulled the plug, a move that is part of a broader pattern of accountability across federal agencies.
When the government stops paying professors to critique America and starts funding work that celebrates it, that is not censorship. That is common sense with a checkbook.
