How the loss of four federal grants is affecting the Science Museum of Minnesota

The treasures are in the basement, stowed on rows of shelves behind a series of locked doors.

A 60 million-year-old dragonfly wing, its delicate veins barely visible in the stone that preserved it. A lace-thin fragment of a woven cloth belt that, likely more than a century ago, adorned a statue of a saint in Chiapas, Mexico.

Most of the artifacts at the Science Museum of Minnesota in downtown St. Paul never make it in front of visitors. Employees have relied on federal grants to digitize these objects so people around the world can see them online.

In April, that funding disappeared. Staff learned they had lost four Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grants totaling more than $625,000, stalling ongoing projects and putting future work in limbo.

Thousands of American museums, libraries and other organizations rely on funding from the IMLS, which granted more than $4.7 million to Minnesota institutions last year.

“Honestly, I don’t think this kind of work is going to get a lot of funding across the entire country for however long it takes for these institutions to come back to what they were,” said Alex Hastings, Fitzpatrick Chair of Paleontology at the Science Museum. “And I’m optimistic that one day they will, but it’s going to be a while.”

The four affected Science Museum projects included digitizing collections of traditional textiles from Chiapas and fossils from Wannagan Creek, North Dakota, as well as working with smaller museums and members of the public on equity and access issues.

After President Donald Trump named the IMLS in a March 14 executive order “[continuing] the reduction in the elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary,” agency employees have been placed on leave and grants terminated.

Science Museum employees received four identical letters dated April 8 saying the IMLS was immediately terminating their grants.

“Upon further review, IMLS has determined that your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program,” read the letter from Acting Director Keith Sonderling. “IMLS is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”

The letter canceling the fossil digitization grant didn’t come through until the following week, and staff were briefly hopeful the project had been spared.

Paleontologists excavated some 16,000 specimens through decades at Wannagan Creek, a unique site that preserved things like leaves, fungus and insects that almost never fossilize. About $130,000 in federal funding would have allowed staff to photograph specimens, digitize paper records, visit schools, travel to the site and, most importantly, hire a temporary staffer.

The work has stopped now, about six months into a planned two-year span.

“Everything is here and will continue to be here,” Hastings said. “It just is going to continue to have the problem that it’s always had, in that people aren’t going to know that it’s here.”

For anthropology curator Ed Fleming, who is leading the textile digitization project, the letter from the IMLS didn’t spell immediate disaster. This particular project is nearly complete, and the temporary position it paid for has already ended. About $20,000 remained of the roughly $190,000 grant.

The loss still hit hard, in part because funding for future work in Chiapas — where the museum has a decades-long relationship with local weavers — is now uncertain.

“It was just symbolic to me, and disappointing, that work like this is no longer a priority of the United States,” Fleming said.

Museums contributed $50 billion to the national economy in 2016, the most recent year of available data, according to the American Alliance of Museums. Nearly $917 million of that was in Minnesota.

Federal funding makes up about 8.5% of the Science Museum’s total budget, and about 20% of that comes from the IMLS, according to Senior Communications Director Emma Filar. The IMLS required grant recipients to match the funding they received.

The Trump administration has taken aim at funding for arts and cultural institutions nationwide, upending work that in some cases involved diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts — another administration target.

Most of the IMLS funding the Science Museum lost was for projects involving DEI: Museums in the Upper Midwest Strategizing for Equity (MUSE), a professional development program for staff at underserved museums in the region; and a separate effort to better engage visitors on the Science Museum’s equity and climate change offerings.

Director of Museum Access and Equity Robby Callahan Schreiber has been at the Science Museum since 2007 and witnessed multiple big economic impacts: the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic and now, the loss of federal funding.

“Those have all, from my vantage, happened with with such a little gap in between that there’s very little time for staff to get into a new state of ‘normal’ and build back,” he said. “And that right as we get to a point of feeling like we’re getting our feet back under us, the rug gets swept out.”