Robin Westphal knows this isn't the first time the future of federal funding for her library has been uncertain. As the director of Daniel Boone Regional Library and president-elect of the Missouri Library Association, she's familiar with the Trump administration's past efforts to cut funds to public libraries.
"This feels a little different this time, because I feel like in this world where we have so much chaos and conflict sort of going on, that this is when people need libraries the most," said Westphal.
The Trump administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 includes a proposal to nearly zero out funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the independent agency responsible for providing federal funds to the country's libraries.
Congress has previously rejected proposed cuts to IMLS, but the most recent proposal comes after a year of legal battles over the agency's existence. Westphal is confident funding will be preserved in this year's budget negotiations, but remains concerned about the message sent by constant threats to the future of libraries.
Last spring, the American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees sued to block Trump's executive order eliminating IMLS. Although the settlement successfully preserved the independent agency, the current proposal now aims to shrink the IMLS budget from $290 million to $6 million–a loss of about 98% of current funding.
The Missouri State Library receives more than $3 million in IMLS funds annually, which is then distributed to the state's local libraries through sub-grants. Westphal previously served as the state librarian responsible for administering these funds. She said one of the biggest programs funded by IMLS is the statewide courier service, which allows inter-library transfers.
"Without that courier service that is provided with these federal funds, many libraries, just because of their budget, would not have anything but maybe a few of the best sellers to be able to provide to their patrons," she said. "They just don't have the depth and the breadth of a collection that their community would want."
IMLS also provides tools that allow libraries to view data and expenditure metrics for similar libraries in different parts of the country.
"They've been collecting this for a long time, so it can help you find peers and a side-by-side comparison and benchmarking," said Jenny Bossaller, program coordinator for the University of Missouri’s Library and Information Science Program.
The Columbia Public Library is part of a large regional system with multiple branches serving Boone and Callaway County, but the public library in the nearby town of Centralia is much smaller. Director Amy-Johnson Hopkins attested to the importance of library programming in a smaller community, and said libraries in extremely rural areas in the state's southern Bootheel region would be impacted even more by a loss of funding.
"In my experience, and I've been here a long time, this library is the center of this community," she said.
Johnson-Hopkins has applied for several IMLS grants through the state library. These grants fund the Centralia library's summer reading program, along with educational programming, physical materials, new computers and server equipment, part-time staff wages and mobile hot spots.
Johnson-Hopkins said their latest IMLS grant is allowing them to upgrade their online card catalog system to Missouri Evergreen, a resource sharing consortium run by the Equinox Open Library Initiative that gives patrons access to items across other library systems.
"We had to re-barcode everything in the library. That was an $11,000 grant," she said. "And then we had to pay for the Equinox training and other things, and that was a $27,000 grant."
Along with local public libraries, IMLS also supports tribal libraries, universities, cultural organizations, and archives. While libraries rely on state sub-grants administered under the Grants to States program, other types of grantees apply for and receive funding directly through the federal agency.
At the University of Missouri, Bossaller and her colleagues in the Library and Information Science Department rely on IMLS grants to support research and training in public library leadership, health librarianship, and public data stewardship. She said there's concern in the department over losing their main source of funding.
"For the research that we do, IMLS is the only federal agency that understands exactly what our purpose is," said Bossaller. She added that grants from other federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and National Institute for Health can be helpful, but aren't specifically tailored to support information science research the way IMLS funds are.
"You can apply for NIH funding, and you might have somebody reviewing your grant that understands what you're talking about, but they might not see the value in it," she said. "IMLS is going to see the value in this, because the people who are reviewing the grants understand the value of public libraries."
The federal appropriations process will continue over the summer, with library scholars, rural librarians, and library advocates across the country keeping a close eye on the latest de-funding negotiations.
