One winter day in 1983, I drove my aged Volkswagen Beetle to the Jonathan Fisher House in Blue Hill, Maine. A recent college grad, I was launching my career as an architectural historian by helping the Maine Humanities Council organize a traveling exhibition about people who contributed to Maine’s development around 1820, when the district gained its political independence from Massachusetts. The show was part of the Maine at Statehood project, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

That day, I pored over Fisher’s architectural drawings, his woodcuts of local plants and animals and his daily journals. A polymath, Fisher was educated at Harvard and moved to what was then a frontier outpost on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay in 1796 to serve as the town’s first settled congregational minister. More than 30 years later, I published a well-received biography of Fisher. That NEH grant set me on a path of research and writing that has lasted more than four decades.

The project also gave some emerging scholars opportunities to share their work with people all over Maine. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, then an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, talked to audiences in town libraries and high school auditoriums about the Maine midwife Martha Moore Ballard. Ulrich would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Ballard, and to see her catchphrase, “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” emblazoned on T-shirts the world over.

Alan Taylor, then a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, spoke widely about the revolt of Maine woodsmen against powerful out-of-state landowners during the Federal period. He, too, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for American history — twice.

I have had many opportunities since then to observe the NEH’s impact across America as a grant reviewer. One impressive project was organized by the Montana Historical Society and focused on the social and economic impact of mining between 1865 and 1920. Over several summers, the Society held institutes for K-12 teachers who developed lesson plans exploring the history of mining in “the richest hills” of the West. The project generated innovative approaches to teaching young people about the legacy of one of the industries the current administration has touted as a foundation of the American economy.

Recently, myself and another Vanderbilt University colleague, Angela Sutton, received NEH funding to convene historians, activists, architects and local community members to discuss the best ways to commemorate another institution formerly on our campus, Roger Williams University. That school provided higher education for African Americans from 1874 until its buildings were destroyed by suspicious fires in 1905. This month, we were notified that our project was canceled — a victim of “administrative termination.”

Small NEH projects like ours, that have an outsize impact on their communities, are precisely what the organization’s acting chair, Michael McDonald, no longer chooses to fund. On April 2, he announced that the NEH would be limiting itself to a smaller number of large grants, and that those would be directed to projects the Trump administration has prioritized. Among those is the construction of a “Garden of American Heroes,” which will receive $17 million from the NEH and an equal amount from the National Endowment for the Arts. Realist sculptures (no abstraction or modernism permitted!) of a heterogeneous group of figures — from Frederick Douglass to Julia Child — will be rubbing shoulders in a yet-to-be-determined location.

Deploying the resources of the NEH to fulfill a presidential fiat will do nothing to realize the body’s mission to enrich cultural life in America, create a more informed citizenry or “facilitate groundbreaking research.”

If greatness is truly the administration’s goal, it should allow the NEH to continue its important work of nurturing projects like Maine at Statehood that cost relatively little, benefit diverse communities and can be truly life-changing.