Watch (or Listen): State Board Convenes in SB to Map Crisis Plan, as Reckless DOGE Cuts Cripple Humanities Grants

The nihilistic Trump/Musk war on "woke" slashed National Endowment for the Humanities funds, imperiling 50 years of partnership with the state non-profit behind projects in SB and around California.

For half a century, California Humanities has helped support vital cultural organizations in Santa Barbara — as venerable as the Historical Society, as popular as the Museum of Natural History, as renowned as the International Film Festival, as beloved as Boxtales Theatre Company, as essential as the Public Library.

California Humanities is the statewide partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The independent nonprofit, founded in 1975, has distributed more than $44 million in grants for thousands of community projects large and small throughout the state.

All that changed on April 2, 2025, when the Endowment got “DOGEd.”

“I received a notice late in the evening on April 2, 2025, letting me know that our funding — which we’d had for 50 years at that point — was immediately terminated,” recalled Rich Noguchi, president and CEO of California Humanities. “We were, as we say, ‘DOGEd.’”

DOGE, of course, was the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-directed, right-wing tech bro Red Guard cadre that for a few months at the start of the Trump administration terrorized Washington by recklessly and mindlessly slashing any program or budget its witless operatives deemed “woke.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in 1965 to ensure the federal government supported culture as much as science, was high on the hit list — and DOGE’s zeroing out of its budget triggered painful downstream impacts for California Humanities and organizations like it in all 49 other states.

This week, as the California Humanities board convened in Santa Barbara for its regular meeting, Noguchi stopped by Newsmakers TV to discuss the real-life impacts of the federal cuts on people and programs throughout California, the state of play in its efforts to reclaim federal funds and secure emergency state financing, and the organization’s strategy to pivot toward fundraising from private donors.

“We put all of our grant-making programs on pause” after the DOGE notices, Noguchi recalled. “All the money that was going out to organizations was put on pause. We also had many current grantees on multi-year grants — commitments we had made — and we then had to send them letters saying we no longer had the funding to fulfill those commitments.

“So that was really painful,” he added.

In our conversation, Noguchi also described his personal and professional journey to his current post, shaped in large part by experience as a Japanese American growing up with the generational trauma triggered by his parents each being sent, at the age of 5, to a concentration camp as part of the World War II Japanese American internment program — for which President Ronald Reagan formally apologized in 1988.

“The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was signed by Ronald Reagan, and it was an apology for the incarceration,” he said. “And what they found in the research to build the case for that legislation is that there were three things that contributed to the constitutional violation and loss of rights for Japanese Americans: fear and hysteria; a failure of political leadership; and outright racism.”

At a time when constitutional rights and the rule of law are once again under siege in the U.S., Noguchi discussed the abiding importance of work being done to preserve and protect humanities programs that advance critical thinking and the fundamental values of a democratic republic.

Watch our full conversation via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.