Librarians grapple with uncertainty over federal fiats

On a particularly balmy spring day last week, a woman was meandering around the Charlotte library when Margaret Woodruff, the library director and friendly face around the building most days, approached her to ask if she needed any help. The woman explained that she had just gotten into town to scout a property she’s looking to buy.

It seemed fitting that Woodruff was one of the first people to greet her in her new town, and that one of the first places she visited was the local library.

News for librarians across the country has been far less bright in recent weeks. Woodruff and several other library directors across Chittenden County have been grappling with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order seeking to eliminate “to the maximum extent” the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries.

Last week, the institute placed its entire 70-person staff on administrative leave.

“We have never had to think about having to defend ourselves as an institution before,” Woodruff said. “We’ve never considered libraries to be the ‘bad guy.’ It’s really so unprecedented.”

In Vermont, the institute provides roughly one-third of the state’s Department of Libraries’ funding, which in 2024, amounted to roughly $1.2 million, said Commissioner and State Librarian Catherine Delneo.

Those federal funds support a slew of shared services within the state, from the interlibrary loan program — the service that moves books and other materials across the state’s libraries and libraries across the nation — to the ABLE library service for the blind and visually impaired, online databases, as well as other resources and professional development for library workers.

Delneo said the state department has been using the Institute of Museum and Library Services funds to provide grants of about $680 annually to help offset local courier costs for the interlibrary loan service for 116 public libraries across the state. Without the federal funds for the program, Delneo said the system could still exist, but the burden to fund the system would shift more to local libraries and taxpayers.

“In South Burlington and in Shelburne there is a lot of support for libraries in the local budget,” Delneo said. “But these resources are important locally because they make up a piece of the total offerings and then in some communities, they’re the full offering, so it could be even more impactful to them there if we had to pare down or eliminate anything.”

Delneo said the Department of Libraries, as of Friday, had not heard anything about its grant being cancelled, but the uncertainty is a battle in and of itself.

Local impact

The Carpenter-Carse Library in Hinesburg is one of those smaller, more rural libraries that relies on that state support for the interlibrary loan courier service and the ABLE library. According to library director Jill Anderson, Carpenter-Carse, like many Vermont libraries, serves an aging population.

“We have people who come in and all they take out are large print books,” Anderson said.

While these resources are essential, Anderson said, a lot of the support from the state library can’t necessarily be qualified in dollar amounts. She pointed to the $350 the library usually receives from the state for its summer reading program as an example.

“People see that number and think that it’s not that big of a deal, but there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes in order to help plan summer reading that the state consultants assist with,” Anderson said.

If the state is forced to scale back because of funding cuts at the federal level, Anderson said there’s a chance the Hinesburg library might lose access to those consultants, making it more difficult to put on different programs.

Should federal funding fall through, even if some libraries can fill in the gaps, the network will still be at stake.

“Even if an individual library is fortunate enough to go back to the town and say, ‘Oh, we need 700 more dollars because that’s our share of the courier service,’ well, that doesn’t solve the problem because there are all the other libraries in Vermont. We’re connected,” Woodruff said.

The Department of Libraries, with the help of federal dollars, also funds online databases that provide access to thousands of video courses on just about every topic, career and SAT test prep materials and research databases with verified information.

“I certainly didn’t put extra money in the budget for databases that the state has been providing for all the years that I’ve been working here,” Jennifer Murray, the director of the South Burlington library said, sitting in her office on the second floor of the building which was bustling even during the mid-day hours last week. “And maybe I’m going to have to.”

The funding cut from the Institute of Museum and Library Services is not the only potential cut to hit local libraries. Last week, overnight, Vermont Humanities received an email that its funding through the National Endowment for the Humanities had been cancelled. This amounts to 42 percent of its funding.

Along with a slew of other grants, Vermont Humanities also partners with local libraries and organizations to put on smaller events — programs like a recent talk at Carpenter-Carse given by anthropologist Michael Lange about the history and culture of maple syrup.

Executive director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrop said it may not always stick out to people that those programs are federally funded. However, in the last two-plus years alone, Vermont Humanities has supported over 60 days of programming and events in Charlotte, Hinesburg, Shelburne and South Burlington, many of which are at the libraries.

While the organization plans to try to fill in the gap with cash reserves and appeals to donors, the future is still uncertain.

Community hubs

Murray said that, more than anything, Trump’s executive orders have created an air of uncertainty in these spaces, one of the only places in a community that is free and accessible to anyone and everyone.

She described libraries as “community hubs” with a unique mission, from hosting reading hours to providing internet access to submit a job application or complete a visa application.

“We have people on the computers every day who are doing something that has to do with betterment or improvement,” Murray said. “We have people who appear to be unhoused, and they regularly are using the recording studio. Are they putting out a vlog? Is it just that they’re making music and it’s for their own joy? I don’t know, but I’m glad that we’re here for them.”

For Anderson at the Carpenter-Carse Library, the space is more than just where she works. It has also been her local library since she moved to Vermont with her daughter 13 years ago. She was a patron years before she was an employee.

“I grew up with libraries being a really important part of my life, coming from a family that didn’t have a lot of resources,” Anderson said. “This particular library was just so welcoming, and the community that my daughter and I found here was something that I needed so much at that point in my life.”

For the many that keep these libraries running, the work exceeds just a job title. It is a labor of love.

Fighting back

Vermont’s Attorney General Charity Clark last week joined a coalition of 20 other state attorneys general in suing the Trump administration to stop the dismantling of Institute of Museum and Library Services and two other agencies targeted in the administration’s executive order.

“Vermonters know that libraries are the heart of our towns and rural communities, and this executive order would threaten their continued health. For some, gutting these grants could jeopardize their very survival,” Clark said. “As chair of the board of my local library, I know how important Vermont’s town libraries are to children, job seekers, elders and all of us.”

For Michael Hibben, director of the Pierson Library in Shelburne, even more than the funding, the existential threat to libraries is weighing on him. Like Woodruff in Charlotte, he never thought he would have to defend their value.

“I am concerned, if we’re slipping into authoritarianism, and it seems that way, what that could mean for libraries, even here in Vermont,” he said. “And if bad things start happening where the federal government tries somehow to censor certain things, what would Vermonters do? Would we stand up to that? How would we stand up to that?”

Hibben said he is planning some relevant programming for Shelburne patrons. In May, the library will host a community read of Timonthy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” a book that looks to lessons from the past to teach people how to fight authoritarianism.