Funding Trouble in the Public Library

Along with the rest of the country, the Roseman University community has weathered a number of dubious decisions cast down from the highest seat in the realm. The mission-driven work at our university proudly continues in the face of adversity—from ASPIRE and related initiatives that inspire marginalized youth to envision themselves as the future of our nation’s healthcare workforce to the EMPOWER program that improves health outcomes for mothers with opioid use disorder.

But the library witnesses troubling waters next door. Our neighbors in the public library face complete budget cuts after the March 14 executive order titled Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy limited budget requests to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) which provides money to states to fund their public libraries. In the coming weeks, we may see a request to Congress to grant only the funds to shut down the agency and effectively close America’s public libraries.

Throughout history, public libraries have earned the love of their users through the provision of free access to information in the form of books, computers and wifi, story times, programming, libraries of things, and other revolutionary programming to serve community members from all socioeconomic backgrounds, some of whom achieved greatness.

Now the library needs you and your stories of libraries delivering on their mission to facilitate democracy through open and free access to information. 

Write and call our Members of Congress and tell your story about the library and tell five other people to take action. Find more links to call and write from the American Library Association’s Action Center.

Read others’ stories for inspiration: 

Maya Angelou [poet, author]: “All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open… Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else. There may be details that are different, but a human being is a human being.

Ray Bradbury [author]: “I’m completely library educated… I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.”

John Green [author, vlogger]: “I could not have written this book [Everything is Turberculosis, 2025] without libraries, librarians, and archivists who helped me with everything from understanding 18th-century corsetry to where my great-uncle Stokes died. My great-uncle had tuberculosis and died in a sanatorium in Asheville, North Carolina, and I’d always known that [he died of TB], but I’d never known where he died, the circumstances of his death, or how long he was a patient there. An archivist helped me understand that. I did a lot of the writing here at the Indianapolis Public Library."

References

Bennet, M. (2025, March 3). Newsmaker: John Green. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2025/03/03/newsmaker-john-green/

Inouye, A. S. (2025, March 19). White House attacks libraries. American Libraries. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/white-house-attacks-libraries/

Montefinise, A. (2010, October 29). Interview: How libraries changed Maya Angelou’s life. Huffington Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-how-libraries-c_b_775980

The White House. (2025, March 14). Continuing the reduction of the federal bureaucracy [Executive order]. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/continuing-the-reduction-of-the-federal-bureaucracy/