Sofia Del Gatto sands a beam while Michael Mason climbs scaffolding at the Herb House at the Sabbathday Shaker Village in New Gloucester on Friday. The Shakers have lost the remaining $187,000 of an Infrastructure and Capacity Building grant that was awarded to them in 2022 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the restoration of the Herb House, a 1796 building that is central to the mission of the only living Shaker community. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

On Monday, the staff at Shaker Village posted an enthusiastic social media update on a project to restore a historic herb house and transform it into a cultural center.

Four days later, the Shakers received a notice from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funding for a large portion of the project — nearly $187,000 of a $750,000 multiyear grant — was canceled.

That loss comes just weeks after the project lost a $1.2 million congressional grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development fund after the most recent spending bill was passed.

The news has been devastating at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, home to the last two Shakers in the world, and casts uncertainty on a project intended to highlight the long history and culture of Shakers in Maine.

Michael Graham, director of the Shaker Village in New Gloucester, walks through a sheep pen inside the barn at the village on Friday. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

“We’re left in utter shock and disbelief,” said Shaker Village Director Michael Graham, his voice choked with emotion. “This is a tough circumstance to digest and process. We are stunned and feeling a bit frozen.”

Officials with the National Endowment for the Humanities sent letters on Thursday informing grant recipients across the country that their awards were canceled. The New York Times reported that Elon Musk’s government efficiency agency was seeking to slash the number of employees in the NEH by 80 percent.

It was the latest move by the federal government to upend arts and humanities organizations as the Trump administration reshapes the federal government. The National Endowment for the Arts has so far been spared from sweeping layoffs but caused confusion with updated guidelines for its grant applications, including a call for projects specifically to celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey has joined 20 other attorneys general in suing the Trump administration to stop the dismantling of three federal agencies that provide services and funding that support public libraries and museums, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which placed most of its staff on leave and cut hundreds of grants for state libraries and museums.

The cuts could mean significant harm to community organizations of all kinds who receive money from those federal agencies. Maine arts nonprofits, libraries, museums, universities and festivals are trying to figure out what will happen to their already precarious budgets. They are contacting elected officials, rallying their supporters, checking on payments, making backup plans, resubmitting grant applications, calling donors — and waiting.

“What happened over the past 24 hours is worse than what I would have imagined in those worst-case scenarios,” said Mollie Cashwell, director of the Cultural Alliance of Maine, a statewide industry group.

Just the threat of cuts is draining and destabilizing.

“The unfortunate thing is how much time and energy is spent in the wondering,” said Nat May, arts program officer at the private Onion Foundation. “All of these workers have really great ideas and really great plans, and they just want to deliver amazing experiences for audiences in Maine. That’s all they want to do. And to have to stop that good and important work because there’s this unnecessary uncertainty is actually really wasteful of their time and their energy.”

DEVASTATING CUTS

Samaa Abdurraqib, executive director at the Maine Humanities Council, got the notice in the middle of the night.

Maine Humanities Council Executive Director Samaa Abdurraqib on Friday at the State House. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

“NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda,” the letter said.

The NEA and the NEH represent a small fraction of the overall federal budget, but distribute millions of dollars every year to support arts and culture in the United States. A chunk goes to the state arts agencies and humanities councils. Colleges, libraries, museums, nonprofits, municipalities, writers, researchers and artists can also apply directly for funding. In Maine, that money has helped pay for archival projects, artist residencies, classical music festivals, public art projects, teacher training, history programs for students, the rehabilitation of a historic mill and many more programs.

Cashwell said the NEH awarded more than $2 million in direct grants to recipients in Maine this year. Those awards often support projects in rural parts of the state that might not otherwise access funding.

“They’re really just providing an essential source of support for the infrastructure and labor that goes into preserving our heritage,” she said.

The Maine Humanities Council, which has 12 employees, got more than $1.4 million from the NEH in 2024, according to its annual report. Abdurraqib said that money usually accounts for 65% to 68% of the annual budget. Because the nonprofit relies so heavily on federal funding, she worked hard to make sure the organization could survive a government shutdown for at least a couple months, but the current situation is more frenzied.

“Things have not been done in a very transparent manner,” Abdurraqib said.

It is also not clear whether the cancellations are legal. The state humanities councils were created and funded by legislation passed in Congress. During his first term, President Donald Trump repeatedly proposed reducing the funding for the NEA and the NEH from roughly $200 million each to zero. Congress rejected those cuts every time, with bipartisan support.

The Cultural Alliance of Maine and other organizations called on their supporters to contact Maine’s congressional delegation to express their concerns. Rep. Chellie Pingree, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee that oversees the NEA and the NEH, called the abrupt termination of these grants “devastating and outrageous.”

“These actions directly endanger state humanities councils — like the exceptional Maine Humanities Council — that serve rural communities, support teachers and students, and keep our history alive,” Pingree said in a written statement Thursday. “Shaker Village, the last active Shaker community in the world, has lost funding for a major restoration project currently in progress. The University of Maine is now stalled out on a critical project to digitize Franco American archival collections that speak to the history of countless Mainers. And those are just a couple examples. We risk losing irreplaceable cultural institutions forever.”

STAYING THE COURSE

Right now, the NEA remains intact. But arts organizations fear what could come.

President Donald Trump stands in the presidential box as he tours the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on March 17. Pool via AP

Trump has already purged Biden appointees from the board of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and replaced them with supporters who made him chairman. His executive orders have forced organizations that have pledged to support diversity, equity and inclusion to wonder if they will lose funding.

Amy Hausmann, executive director of the Maine Arts Commission, said the agency is still operating “business as usual.” The commission gets roughly half of its $2 million budget from the NEA. It opened grant applications as planned this winter and is now reviewing applications. The awards would come out of the budget for the next fiscal year, which starts in July and is still undetermined.

“Unless there is a specific reason to alter our course, we plan to keep all avenues of support open,” Hausmann wrote in an email on Feb. 7.

In an interview, Hausmann and Chairman Bob Keyes said they are watching the developments in Augusta and in Washington.

“We’ve been planning for these grants for many, many months,” Hausmann said. “We’re going to go ahead and are looking forward to being able to award those when the funding is received.”

Ian Bannon, executive director of Mayo Street Arts. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald

“We want our constituents to know,” Keyes said. “We’re not running and hiding. We’re going to continue to administer the grant programs until we’re told not to.”

In January, Mayo Street Arts learned that the nonprofit would receive a $20,000 grant from the NEA for its biennial puppetry festival. Executive Director Ian Bannon said that while no one has said they won’t get the money, the award now feels less certain. Like many federal agencies, the NEA pays grants as reimbursements, and he is worried that the nonprofit will spend the money, only to be told it won’t be repaid as promised.

Mayo Street has to match the grant, so the total amount dedicated to this project is $40,000. “For an organization of our size, that’s over 10% of our operating budget for the year,” Bannon said. “That’s something we couldn’t do on prospect.”

Perry Price, executive director at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, said the nonprofit got a grant last year from the NEA that helped expand its prestigious artist residency outside the usual summer months. When the president briefly cut off federal grants in January, Haystack had not yet received most of the $30,000 balance. When the freeze ended, Price said Haystack submitted its reimbursement requests and received the rest of the money.

But he still remembers that chaos, as do others who are submitting applications for the next round of NEA grants.

“We will continue to apply to the NEA,” Price said. “We have changed our expectations of success. We have less confidence in our ability to be funded by the NEA than we have in the past.”

‘COMMITTED TO THE MISSION’

Fundraising for Shaker Village’s $4.4 million Herb House project has raised over $2.2 million so far, much of which was required as matching funds for the NEH grant.

Michael Graham, director of the Shaker Village in New Gloucester, mucks out a sheep pen inside the barn at the village on Friday. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

Since construction started a year ago, work has been done to lift the building to add a new foundation and make extensive structural repairs. The next phase will focus on the interior and include more structural work, making the building accessible and bringing it up to current codes.

“Of course there are powerful feelings of sadness and discouragement, but we’re also committed to the mission of seeing this project remain successful and come to completion,” Graham said.

Graham said they are still processing what the lost funding means for the project’s future. He has been in touch with Pingree’s office, as well as the staffs for Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, who he says are united in their support of funding for the project.

“The only thing we can do is to mobilize quickly and figure out how to make an effective appeal to private citizens and draw upon their generosity to maintain the fabric of Maine’s community,” he said. “It’s going to be very difficult because this situation that’s happening right now is forcing all types of nonprofit organizations and other agencies to scramble to find alternative sources of funding to keep their doors open.

“It’s going to be a lot of competition and maybe chaos.”

This story was updated on Saturday, April 5, to clarify Mayo Street Arts’ budget and grant-matching requirements.