The National Endowment for the Humanities has terminated two grants totaling $120,000 that funded research on LGBTQ cartoonists and "multiethnic graphic literature," according to a report from The College Fix. Both grants, each worth $60,000, were awarded in the final weeks of the Biden administration and axed in April 2025 as part of a broader overhaul of how the agency distributes taxpayer money.
The first grant went to University of Florida English professor Margaret Alice Galvan for a book titled "Comics in Movement," which, according to its own description, examines how LGBTQ+ cartoonists "innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s."
The second went to San José State University assistant professor Maite Urcaregui for "Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature."
Neither researcher nor the NEH itself responded to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
The project descriptions tell you everything you need to know about where priorities sat at the NEH before the current administration stepped in.
Galvan's grant description frames LGBTQ+ cartoonists of the 1980s and '90s as documenting life "in a moment when the community was facing government neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis and disregard for their civil liberties," adding that "their comics have been largely forgotten." The grant, in other words, existed to resurrect niche activist art and repackage it as scholarship worthy of federal funding, as Fox News reports.
Urcaregui's project was, if anything, more steeped in the academic jargon that has become a dialect unto itself. She planned to:
"Analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors alongside contemporaneous visual archives and critical legal histories to underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions."
Read that sentence twice and ask yourself what concrete knowledge it produces for the American public. The answer, for most taxpayers, is nothing. It is ideology dressed in academic syntax, funded with money taken from people who never asked for it and would never have approved it.
These two grants were not isolated casualties. The Washington Post reported on April 7, 2025, that the NEH canceled over 1,200 grants following staffing and funding reductions tied to federal cost-cutting efforts. The scale of the cancellations signals something larger than a line-item dispute. It reflects a fundamental reassessment of what the humanities endowment is for.
The NEH confirmed to The College Fix that the timeline was straightforward:
"Both grants were awarded at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration, and terminated in April 2025."
The Biden administration, in its closing months, seeded these grants into the system the way outgoing tenants leave furniture bolted to the floor. The current administration simply unbolted it.
On April 24, the NEH posted an announcement outlining its new direction. The agency said it had taken:
"Programmatic steps to ensure that all future awards will, among other things, be merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country."
Merit-based. No extreme ideologies. Grounded in founding principles. These are not radical propositions. They are the baseline standards that should have governed the NEH from the beginning.
Not everyone agreed the cleanup should proceed unimpeded. In July, Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction pausing the cancellation of certain NEH grants, citing First Amendment concerns.
The legal challenge is worth watching but not worth overstating. Preliminary injunctions are temporary measures, not final rulings. They reflect a judge's initial assessment that plaintiffs might succeed on the merits, nothing more. The core question of whether taxpayers are constitutionally obligated to fund academic projects that promote race and gender ideology remains very much open.
And that question deserves an honest answer. The First Amendment protects your right to write about LGBTQ cartoonists or "multiethnic graphic literature" on your own time and your own dime. It does not guarantee you $60,000 from the federal treasury to do so. There is a vast difference between censorship and defunding, and the left has spent decades deliberately blurring that line.
For years, agencies like the NEH operated as a quiet conveyor belt for progressive academic priorities. Grants flowed to projects built on frameworks of identity, grievance, and deconstruction. The language was always dense enough to discourage scrutiny.
The dollar amounts were always small enough to avoid headlines. And the cumulative effect was an entire federal infrastructure dedicated to subsidizing a worldview that most Americans never voted for and would reject if they read the grant descriptions aloud at a town hall.
That is what makes these two grants instructive. They are not large. They are not dramatic. They are ordinary. They represent the thousands of small funding decisions that, taken together, amount to the federal government choosing sides in a cultural argument and billing the public for it.
The grants still appear on the NEH website, a small irony. But the money behind them is gone, and the agency's stated direction is clear. Future funding will be tied to merit and national purpose, not to the priorities of an academic establishment that long ago stopped asking whether its work served anyone outside the faculty lounge.
Sixty thousand dollars for a book about forgotten activist cartoons. Sixty thousand more for a study on how graphic novels "reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies." The Biden administration thought that was a good use of your money. The current administration disagreed.
That is not censorship. That is accountability.
