Report Shows US Museums Hit Hard by Trump Cuts
69Nov. 13, 2025
Asurveypublished this week by theAmerican Alliance of Museums(AAM) reveals American museums to have been negatively affected by the Trump administration’s funding cuts across the arts and culture sector. The AAM, which represents 35,000 museums and museum staffers throughout the US, surveyed 6,712 museum directors. Though it received replies from just 511 of these, or roughly 8 percent, the response showed institutions struggling to reckon with cuts while already dealing with ongoing trends of rising costs and declining attendance.
Among the federal organizations that have canceled grants this year are theInstitute of Museum and Library Services(IMLS), theNational Endowment for the Humanities, and theNational Endowment for the Arts. The average grant loss experienced by museums was $30,000. According to the AAM survey, one third of museums saw government grants or contracts canceled. One in three institutions said they had deferred or delayed construction or renovation, with one in four canceling or paring down programs aimed at students, rural audiences, people with disabilities, elderly individuals, or veterans. One in ten laid off staff.
Of the institutions that lost grants or contracts, two thirds reported that they were unable to recover the money, but eight percent said they were able to regain total funding. Some turned to private donors or received aid from philanthropic organizations such as the the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Others successfully appealed to the federal agencies that had retracted their funding or obtained reimbursement for money already spent, while still others gained relief from a May 1 court ruling temporarily preventing the Trump administration from dismantling several federal agencies, among them the IMLS.
Coming up with the money to cover lost grants “involves every department, a lot of time and labor and scenario planning,” Lisa Melandri, executive director of the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, told the New York Times. “The destabilization of all of this has been really detrimental.”