DOGE slashed humanities funding. What’s getting cut in South Carolina?
$2,300 for a poetry festival in Rock Hill. $15,000 to research Black South Carolinians who fought in the Revolutionary War. $5,000 for music classes at a women’s prison. $10,000 toward storytelling seminars for veterans.
These are just some of the recent grants dispensed by the South Carolina Humanities Council, which helps fund cultural enrichment efforts all over the state. From genealogy symposiums to college classes to senior center lectures to museum displays, the nonprofit group helps pick up the tab, largely with federal dollars that the U.S. Congress has promised it and similar humanities organizations in other states each year since the 1960s.
But now President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency wants that money back. Earlier this month, the federal agency revoked the majority of the $65 million promised to state humanities organizations by Congress in 2025. In all, DOGE told the National Endowment for the Humanities to “claw back” $175 million from it’s budget of just over $200 million.
“This is funding that was appropriated by Congress ... this is funding that has been promised to the states that is now being withdrawn,” Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, told NPR earlier this month.
The cuts to the humanities account for a fraction of a percent of the national budget, but they will have a dramatic impact on history education, literary diversity, and the ability to provide an accurate record of events for future generations, say experts in the field, including those here in South Carolina.
Funding cuts
Books and authors and games and crafts beckoned readers into the Richland County Library in downtown Columbia last month for the first literary festival held there in six years. It came together with help from a $15,000 grant given by the state humanities council.
“A lot of programming that folks have either grown used to or enjoyed will be lost” without federal support, said Randy Akers, Executive Director of South Carolina Humanities.
The nonprofit humanities organization has led history and cultural events in South Carolina for more than 50 years. One of its proudest achievements is bringing traveling Smithsonian exhibits to rural communities across the state every year.
On April 3, the organization received a letter informing it that the federal dollars it had been promised were being revoked. SC Humanities was set to receive just over $1 million in federal dollars in 2025. At the point those grants were canceled, the nonprofit was still owed more than $600,000 for 2025 programs and its basic operating costs.
Those federal dollars cover 80% of SC Humanities’ budget. Without them, the organization may not survive. They have enough money in the bank to stay afloat for at least another six months, Akers said. After that, their survival will depend on if Congress decides to fund them in 2026.
The money does more than just keep the nonprofit’s lights on. In 2024, the organization gave out $449,703 in grant dollars to libraries, universities, small towns, volunteer-run museums and other cultural and history groups across the state.
Among the recipients of those dollars was Historic Columbia, which received a $15,000 grant in 2024 to help redesign a 1820s kitchen in the Robert Mills House, which is one of just five national historic landmarks in South Carolina’s Capital.
Humanities council grants have helped Historic Columbia pay for a range of work, from historic walking tours in some of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, to a project documenting LGBTQ history here.
“We are nervous about what the impacts to our community are going to be, specifically around education,” said Historic Columbia Executive Director Suzanne Brooks about the federal cuts to the humanities. “What could be dismantled in weeks and months could take decades to potentially rebuild.”
At the point DOGE rescinded SC Humanities’ 2025 money, the nonprofit had paid out $188,645 in grants for the year. The nonprofit has suspended issuing grants for the rest of 2025. Put another way, that’s a roughly 58% decrease in funding for humanities projects between 2024 and 2025.
Brooks said without federal help, Historic Columbia will likely pivot to more private fundraising. She thinks the organization will get the support it needs from private donors, but there’s no way to say yet how that would affect the nonprofit’s programming.
Future grants suspended
The “humanities” can feel stuffy and intellectual, said Akers, acknowledging that it’s not always clear what “humanities” education even is. But really, he said, it’s simply a discipline about people and their everyday lives.
One of the more beloved projects assisted by the humanities council was a 2018 documentary called “Charlie’s Place” produced by South Carolina ETV. It told the story of a Black nightclub in Myrtle Beach where Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and other greats of the era played. In 1950, the Ku Klux Klan raided the club and beat its African American owner, Charlie Fitzgerald. But Fitzgerald recovered and kept the club open another decade. That project received a grant worth almost $7,000 from SC Humanities.
Another popular project is a traveling show about different food festivals held around the state, created along with the South Carolina State Museum.
“Almost any topic you can think of that’s part of life and part of the South Carolina story gets told in a lot of these programs that we do,” Akers said. “It’s not stuffy stuff.”
Humanities projects aren’t completely dead in 2025.
SC Humanities gave out almost $200,000 before DOGE shut off access to the federal grant dollars. That money included $15,000 to help the disability rights nonprofit AbleSC tell the stories of people treated at the South Carolina State Hospital, a psychiatric facility formerly in the heart of what is now the BullStreet district.
Also funded this year was $6,200 to support a Juneteenth festival at Charleston’s Magnolia Plantation, an event venue that used to be a functioning plantation where enslaved people worked; and $10,000 for an exhibit on state-recognized Native American tribes in South Carolina.
But until SC Humanities knows what the future will hold, it has suspended any future grants for the year. Akers said he likely won’t know the nonprofit’s fate until Congress sits down to write the 2026 budget.
This story was originally published April 15, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
