SpectrUM, the University of Montana-affiliated nonprofit science center located inside the Missoula Public Library, lost two federal grants totaling $500,000 as part of sweeping cuts to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, according to spectrUM Discovery Area director Alex Sobin.
The first grant, issued in 2023, funded an evaluation program, while the second, issued last year, was designed to offer inclusive science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics education opportunities for immigrants and refugees in Missoula. SpectrUM had spent less than $125,000 across both grants. They were supposed to last for three years.
Sobin said she knew from previous communications from the feds that the museum could be losing funding.
“We have money to work with Indigenous communities, refugee communities — we weren’t going to be surprised if we saw that money get eliminated,” she said. But she finds the loss of the evaluation grant puzzling.
Sobin said the museum was notified of the cuts in an 8 p.m. email on April 9 with minimal justification.
IMLS told spectrUM that the grants were “unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer [serve] the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program,” according to Sobin.
“It’s being described as a grant termination, which is not something we’ve ever seen before.”
The grants were “unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer [serve] the interest of the United States.”
SpectrUM’s roughly $1.1 million budget is about half funded by federal grants, Sobin said. The museum is used to ebbs and flows in funding. “But historically,” she said, “we’ve had notice, and we’ve been able to do things like make preparations for loss of grant funds at the end of a grant period.”
In late March, the Trump administration put the entire staff of the IMLS, the main source of federal funding for libraries and museums nationwide, on administrative leave, pursuant to an executive order calling for the agency — among several others — to be shut down “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” with the stated purpose of reducing the federal bureaucracy.
“We will revitalize IMLS and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations,” Keith Sonderling, the deputy secretary of labor who was sworn in as Trump’s acting director of the agency in March, said in a statement to The New York Times.
The American Library Association and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are challenging the cuts in court.
Sobin said she’s not been able to get in touch with any of the grant administrators with whom the museum previously worked.
“We are quite confident that the reason we are getting no response is there’s just no one there at the other end of the email,” she said.
SpectrUM has a staff of 18, of which four are full-time employees. While Sobin said any budgetary changes affect the whole staff, this particular funding mostly supported the physical museum space, which is free to the public.
Much of the museum’s work focuses on outreach, which accounts for the bulk of its budget and is largely privately funded, Sobin said. She noted the museum reaches 200,000 Montana kids across the state each year through programs like Science on Wheels, which, as described on spectrUM’s website, “transforms school gyms and cafeterias into powerful science learning centers that help inspire Montana’s next generation of scientists, health care providers, engineers, and visionaries.”
Such programs should be safe. But the museum’s core function — as a physical, public learning space — is under threat, Sobin said.
“I’m not saying we’re closing our doors, but where we’re really looking is pivoting to more community support,” she said.
“I’m not saying we’re closing our doors, but where we’re really looking is pivoting to more community support.”
But it’s hard to make up for the scale of federal funding. Each of the $250,000 grants were to be distributed to the museum over three years and only in the form of reimbursements.
“The nice thing about grants and the case to be made for the existence of federal grants is we are held to an extremely high level of rigor for our spending,” Sobin said. “We have to account for every penny.”
Nonprofit organizations across Missoula and the rest of the country have been hit hard by the recent spate of federal cuts. Among others: Humanities Montana, the state’s arts council, announced it lost about 90 percent of its funding earlier this month; more than $1 billion in cuts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to national food aid programs resulted in a loss of about $180,000 in federal dollars for the Missoula Food Bank and Community Center; and Garden City Harvest, a local network of community farms and gardens, lost its SNAP accreditation and associated funding.
The organization had previously accepted SNAP, also known as food stamps, for its farm shares and its farm stand at Orchard Gardens. The loss of accreditation will likely affect about two dozen customers who regularly use SNAP dollars, the organization said.
“Funding cuts to nonprofit organizations in our community are happening at an alarming rate — almost daily,” Genevieve Jessop Marsh, Garden City Harvest’s outreach director, said in a press release. “The landscape is changing at a pace we’ve never seen in our organization’s 29-year history. Garden City Harvest is looking for ways to make up this funding, and make it up fast — this work, these people, are why we got started in the first place. So many other organizations are also looking to make up funding — from the Missoula Food Bank and the Montana Food Bank Network to Humanities Montana and Travelers’ Rest State Park. Will private funders step in? Or will those with the least suffer the most?”
According to a report published in early April by the Montana Nonprofit Association, Missoula County ranks first in the state for total federal dollars awarded to nonprofits from fiscal years 2021 through 2024.
