Trump Cuts and Orders Have Broad Impact on American Museums, Report Finds

In the years since the pandemic, American museums have been working hard to restore their attendance and financial health. But a new survey of museum directors reveals that the glimmer of progress is reversing, in part due to targeted executive orders and federal cutbacks for the arts.

One-third of American museums have lost government grants or contracts since President Trump took office, according to the survey released Tuesday by the American Alliance of Museums, which represents 35,000 museums and museum professionals across the country. The losses have forced museums to make difficult choices, including deferring construction projects, reducing or canceling programming and laying off employees.

The alliance sent its survey to 6,712 museum directors by email over the summer. Although the sample size is relatively small — 511 museum directors responded, or about eight percent — the report paints the clearest picture yet of the widespread impact of grant cancellations from federal organizations, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services (I.M.L.S.), the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.), and the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.).

To offset these losses, museums have made painful trade-offs, the alliance found. One in three museums said they had deferred or delayed infrastructure improvements or construction. One in four canceled or reduced specialized programs for students, rural audiences, individuals with disabilities, elderly people, or veterans. One in 10 laid off staff members.

Support from the N.E.A., N.E.H. and I.M.L.S. “really does touch a gigantic swath of museums across the U.S.,” Lisa Melandri, the executive director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, said. The Missouri museum was one of many institutions to receive emails this spring stating that previously awarded grants — $40,000 for an exhibition of the work of the Japanese ceramist Shinichi Sawada and $65,000 for the North St. Louis Creative Field Guide, a program exploring art and nature in the North St. Louis section of the city — were no longer in line with “the needs and priorities” of the administration.

Nevertheless, two-thirds of affected respondents have been unable to replace their lost funding, according to the directors’ report. Only eight percent of respondents managed to claw back the money they had expected to receive in its entirety. The median grant loss was $30,000, according to the alliance.

CAM St. Louis and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (known as BAMPFA) are among the museums that partly replaced lost federal funding with private donations. Plugging these shortfalls “involves every department, a lot of time and labor and scenario planning,” Melandri said. “The destabilization of all of this has been really detrimental.”

Julie Rodrigues Widholm, BAMPFA’s director, says the community has “shown up in record numbers” to support its display of 20th-century African American quilts in the exhibition “Routed West,” after $40,000 in federal grant money was cut last spring. (It also successfully petitioned the N.E.A. to reinstate the grant.) People purchased nearly 1,000 copies of the catalog, and daily attendance nearly doubled for the show, on view through Nov. 30. Private donors helped the museum recover $230,000 in lost federal funds for conservation, but without additional support, “we do not have the resources necessary to complete the urgent, time-sensitive work to preserve these fragile quilts for future generations,” Widholm said.

The grant losses compound what is already a difficult year for museums, according to the report. After several years spent slowly crawling back toward prepandemic attendance levels, more than half of responding museums are seeing fewer visitors in 2025 than they were in 2019.

Some respondents attributed this decline to weakened travel and tourism as well as widespread economic uncertainty. Museums in the Mid-Atlantic region — including New York, Philadelphia, and Washington — saw their attendance suffer most; it now lags 10 percent behind prepandemic levels, on average.

Well before the election, financial performance had begun to trend downward. The number of museums that reported being worse off financially in 2024 than they had been in 2019 rose by seven percent, to 26 percent, which represents a “concerning downturn,” according to the alliance. Marilyn Jackson, the group’s president and chief executive, cited the Speed Museum in Louisville, Ky., which eliminated its entire learning and engagement department of nine people in September, amid financial challenges including the loss this year of grants.

More than one-quarter of the museums in the survey project that their bottom lines will decline further in 2025. This finding stuck out to Jackson because, she said, “to run a museum, you need to be a very optimistic person.”

Around half of the 511 directors who responded to the survey lead art and history museums; the rest oversee science museums, children’s museums, and other kinds of museums. A spokeswoman for the alliance said the survey’s response rate has grown gradually in recent years, but acknowledged that it may be limited because it requires input from executive directors, who are often pressed for time and frequently surveyed.

The figures compiled by the alliance align with broader recent surveys of arts organizations — not only museums, but also theaters, orchestras and dance companies — in the United States. Between 2019 and 2024, revenue for nonprofit arts and culture organizations fell by more than a third (after accounting for inflation), according to SMU DataArts, a research center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Amid rising costs and shrinking attendance and revenue, some museums — including the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington state and the California Historical Society in San Francisco — have closed. These trends suggest “significant financial distress that warrants continued monitoring,” according to the alliance’s report.