Cuts That Hurt

If you poll most Americans of all political stripes, you’d find a general agreement that there’s likely waste and fraud in the massive amount of federal spending, and that identifying and eliminating it would be a worthwhile task.

What’s happening, though, in the first 100 days of the second Donald Trump administration is drawing criticism, and it’s because the cuts are being made with a chainsaw — Elon Musk’s symbolism, not ours — instead of a scalpel. Surgery was needed, but the intervention appears far worse than the ailment the nation came in with.

One piece of evidence to support that: the cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. In March, Trump signed an executive order calling for its elimination “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” That ship has sailed, and some local librarians are quietly in a panic.

As detailed last week, the problem isn’t so much direct federal money — libraries from Montauk to Westhampton Beach receive money from Washington, D.C., in small amounts, usually amounting to a few thousand dollars a year. But New York State receives about $8.1 million in grant funding from IMLS, and that helps pay for essential programs to the state’s library system. That will have an impact: “You might not see it immediately,” one local library official said, “but you’ll see it down the line.”

What’s particularly nettlesome about this move is the numbers. As the story noted, the agency’s $304 million budget amounts to 0.0046 percent of the $3.6 trillion spending plan. Eliminating it completely — which is what’s happening — will be very destructive to libraries, but it will not have any impact on the bottom line in Washington, which spends that amount in less than an hour, every hour of every day.

Meanwhile, elimination means it’s all considered waste or fraud, right? Does anyone really believe that the nation’s libraries are the hotbed of out-of-control federal spending?

So, there must be another motivation for these particularly tone-deaf cuts. It’s really important for every American taxpayer to consider that point, since the cuts are being made in our names. But virtually nobody called for libraries to be gutted as part of the first wave of belt-tightening.

Libraries have an enormous effect on local communities, particularly parts of the population who have less access to information or resources. They are like community centers in many places. They are so much more than a collection of books. They’re not quiet places these days — they are vibrant spaces that encourage conversation and debate, and are serving people at every life stage, from infant to elderly.

It’s up to everyone to decide what the motivation is. A Letter to the Editor this week from a veteran librarian suggests that the aim is “to destroy those who support and preserve knowledge, who try to make it accessible to those striving to self-educate, to sustain democracy.” That can’t be dismissed out of hand until a better explanation is on offer.

This is National Library Week, April 6 to 12, the perfect opportunity to reflect on these cuts, their societal impact and what made them such a priority. Perhaps it was just low-hanging fruit, “picking on the kid with glasses,” as Kelly Harris, director of the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, put it last week. If so, it’s a moment when people of character stand up to the bully on the victim’s behalf. Someone has to do it.