Trump Forces Chair of National Endowment for the Humanities from Post
138March 15, 2025
Shelly C. Lowe, the first Native person to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities and the second woman ever to occupy the role, left her post on March 12 “at the direction of President Trump,” according to an agency spokesperson. TheNew York Timesbroke the news of her departure. Michael McDonald, the NEH’s general counsel, will serve as acting chairman “until such time as the president nominates and the Senate confirms a new NEH chairman.”
A citizen of the Navajo Nation, Lowe is a scholar of higher education. She was nominated to lead the NEH by then-president Joe Biden in October 2021 and confirmed to a typical four-year term in the role by the Senate the following February. Lowe from 2015 until 2022 had served on the National Council on the Humanities, an advisory body of the NEH, after being appointed by former president Barack Obama. Lowe was previously a trustee for the National Museum of the American Indian, the director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and the executive director of Harvard University’s Native American Program.
The NEH was founded in 1965 and has since distributed more than $6 billion in grants to museums, libraries, historic sites, and universities, among other organizations, through forty-seven separate programs. Lowe’s forced departure comes weeks after Maria Rosario Jackson resigned as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, just ahead of Trump’s inauguration. The NEA is being temporarily helmed by Mary Anne Carter, who served in the first Trump administration. Since beginning his second term as president, Trump has telegraphed a desire to reshape federally funded arts and cultural institutions, installing himself as chair of the Kennedy Center and slashing the budget of the General Services Administration, which commissions and maintains thousands of artworks.