On July 24, 2025, in a quiet Manhattan courtroom, a federal judge sent a loud message to Donald Trump and future presidents: You cannot use the power of the purse to erase inconvenient voices from American history.
In Authors Guild v. NEH, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York Colleen McMahon issued a preliminary injunction blocking the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from terminating more than 1,400 previously approved research grants.
The ruling is more than a procedural win for the plaintiffs — a coalition of the Authors Guild and eight individual scholars. It’s a landmark statement on the First Amendment, academic freedom, and the limits of executive power. It’s also a case study in what happens when ideology tries to dictate which Americans get to tell their stories.
In May 2025, the NEH — under the direction of DOGE — abruptly canceled roughly $175 million in humanities grants that had already been awarded to individual scholars, authors, and small research teams. These were not speculative applications. These grants had been vetted, approved, and budgeted by Congress. Many recipients had already quit jobs, declined other funding opportunities, or embarked on multi-year research projects relying on NEH support.
DOGE’s justification? A “realignment” of NEH priorities toward projects that promote “American exceptionalism” and a rejection of what it labeled “woke” (there’s that misused word again) scholarship. Evidence in the case revealed that dozens of grants were flagged and targeted for cancellation simply because they addressed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics — including a historical study of Ku Klux Klan resurgence in the late 20th century.
In other words, the cuts weren’t about Money. They were about political views.
Judge McMahon did not mince words. Her opinion was blunt:
“Agency discretion does not include discretion to violate the First Amendment. Nor does it give the Government the right to edit history.”
The judge found that the plaintiffs would likely prevail on their claim that the cancellations amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. The First Amendment prevents the government from punishing or suppressing speech simply because it disapproves of the message — and that applies whether the speech is in a newspaper, on a stage, or in a peer-reviewed monograph funded by a federal grant.
The court also held that the abrupt terminations likely violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), which requires agencies to follow proper notice-and-comment procedures and to avoid arbitrary, capricious decision-making. Simply erasing existing awards without explanation, she wrote, was exactly the kind of “arbitrary government action” the APA was designed to prevent.
While the ruling does not immediately force NEH to pay out the canceled funds (that question belongs to the Court of Federal Claims), it freezes them in place, preventing the Trump Administration from reallocating the money elsewhere until the case is resolved.
This case is not just about 1,400 scholars losing their funding. It’s about whether the government can quietly strangle entire fields of inquiry by cutting off their oxygen supply. Public funding for scholarship isn’t charity — it’s an investment in the country’s cultural and historical record. The NEH’s mandate is to “promote excellence in the humanities and convey the lessons of history to all Americans.” That mandate doesn’t come with an asterisk reading “except when the subject matter makes current office holders uncomfortable.”
If this ruling had gone the other way, it would have created a dangerous precedent: Future administrations could wipe out entire bodies of research with the Stroke of a pen, targeting anything from labor history to environmental justice, the history of American military failures, or anything else a current president finds offensive.
Legal principles aside, the harm here is personal and immediate. A historian documenting Black soldiers’ contributions in Vietnam was forced to pause field interviews with Aging veterans. A linguist studying endangered Native languages had to lay off her only research assistant. An author midway through a book on the role of women in Reconstruction-era politics faced the prospect of abandoning years of work.
These are not “woke” pet projects. They are stories that make up the tapestry of American life. When they are silenced, our understanding of ourselves becomes narrower, shallower, and more distorted.
The NEH mass terminations are part of a broader campaign by the Trump Administration to reshape — or dismantle — the federal government’s cultural and intellectual infrastructure. Similar cuts and policy shifts have hit the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and even the Library of Congress.
Scholarly associations like the American Historical Association, Modern Language Association, and American Council of Learned Societies have also gone to court over these moves, warning that the cumulative effect is to hobble America’s ability to preserve and interpret its own history. And, as I reported in this space yesterday, Trump has also hijacked the Kennedy Center simply to satify his massive ego.
These aren’t partisan alarm bells. The right to research, publish, inform, or entertain without political interference is a bedrock American principle — one that conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between should want to protect.
The Authors Guild v. NEH case will now move toward a full trial, where the court will decide on the merits whether the grant cancellations were unconstitutional and unlawful under the APA. The government may appeal the preliminary injunction in the meantime, setting up another round of legal battles.
Whatever the outcome, the case has already drawn national attention to the quiet ways in which government can censor without passing a single speech-restricting law: by controlling who gets funded and who doesn’t.
It’s tempting to see this as a fight between academics and bureaucrats, but that’s not what this is. The humanities are where we grapple with who we are as a nation. They are how we remember and decide what is worth remembering. When the government starts redlining history, it’s not long before it starts redlining citizens.
As an author of legal and political fiction, and an avid reader, I don’t want the government controlling what I write any more than I want the government to control what I read. Book bans are not just offensive; they are unconstitutional.
The fight over these 1,400 NEH grants is a fight over whether history belongs to all of us, or only to those in power. If you believe in protecting independent scholarship, now is the time to speak up. Contact your elected representatives. Support the organizations that are fighting these cases. And most of all, keep reading, writing, and sharing the stories that some would prefer we forget.
Mark M. Bello is an attorney and author of 9 Zachary Blake Legal Thrillers and other legal themed novels and children’s books. For more information, please visit https://www.markmbello.com
Â
