A $207 million agency canceled two-thirds of itself. A court just ordered it undone.

The National Endowment for the Humanities is a small agency by federal standards — $207 million a year, less than the Pentagon spends before breakfast — and most of that money was never NEH's to keep.▸ It is a pass-through to scholars, archives, museums, and fifty-six state and territorial humanities councils. In April 2025, acting on DOGE recommendations, the agency canceled more than 1,400 of those grants and laid off two-thirds of its own staff in the same season. On May 7, 2026, a federal judge ruled the terminations illegal and ordered them undone. NEH now has to rebuild a $100 million grant pipeline with the people it has left.

NEH's appropriation has sat at $207.0 million for four straight years — FY2025 was funded at "the FY2024 level of $207.0 million" under a continuing resolution, and FY2026 landed at the same number.▸ The breakdown below comes from the agency's own FY2025 Congressional Justification, the most recent year Congress set a fully itemized NEH budget.

The single largest line isn't research grants or public programming — it's the check NEH cuts to itself out of, to the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils that operate in every state plus D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa.▸ At $65 million, that's roughly 40 percent of NEH's program funds, and it's formulaic, non-competitive money the councils count on every year to run local grant programs of their own. Administration — the agency running itself — is $36 million, about a sixth of the total.

On April 4, 2025, NEH sent standardized termination notices to grant recipients across the country.▸ The scale of it wasn't disclosed at the time; it came out in litigation. Judge Colleen McMahon's May 7, 2026 opinion in American Council of Learned Societies v. NEH (S.D.N.Y., No. 25-cv-3657, consolidated with The Authors Guild v. NEH, No. 25-cv-3923) put the number at "more than 1,400 grants, representing over $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations." Her 143-page ruling found DOGE staff had drafted the termination lists and signed NEH's chairman's name to the notices without his involvement, and declared the mass termination "unlawful, unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect" — a First Amendment violation, an equal-protection violation, and an action DOGE had no statutory authority to take in the first place.

The court's order is a permanent injunction, not a check.▸ NEH's own FAQ for reinstated awards lays out the mechanics: grant recipients must file a "Reinstatement Assurance Form" within 30 days of notification — accepted through November 30, 2026 — and each award gets a restart period plus a time extension scaled to how long it sat frozen, but no additional money beyond what was originally awarded. No new funding is arriving; what's being restored is the clock and the paperwork trail on money Congress already appropriated. As MLA executive director Paula Krebs told Inside Higher Ed, the reversal came "a year late for everybody — more than a year late," and pretenure faculty who lost research funding mid-project don't get that year back.

Restoring the grants is now the job of an agency that gutted its own capacity to process them.▸ NEH's FY2025 Congressional Justification put the agency's most recently enacted funded staffing level at 172 full-time-equivalent employees — mostly humanities PhDs running peer review and grants management. On June 10, 2025, NEH's own reorganization announcement confirms a reduction in force eliminated two-thirds of that workforce, and The Art Newspaper's reporting on the same RIF put the number laid off at roughly 100, leaving fewer than 60 employees — NEH has never published an exact post-RIF headcount.

Seven grantmaking offices and divisions were folded into four.▸ The agency that has to process reinstatement paperwork for 1,400-plus grants, run its usual peer-review cycle, and administer $65 million a year to 56 outside organizations is doing it with roughly a third of the people it had when the FY2023 budget was set.

Budget figures are NEH's FY2023 enacted appropriation, the basis Congress has carried forward at $207.0 million through FY2026 via continuing resolutions; termination and staffing figures span 2025–2026 as cited inline and in the table beneath each chart.