History jobs aren’t easy to come by. So when a position for a digital archivist opened at the University of Wyoming in 2020, Rachael Laing uprooted their life near Chicago for small-town Laramie. 

Laing, who has a master’s degree in history, has spent the last five years undertaking a project to digitize hundreds of thousands of historic Wyoming newspaper microfilm pages and make them free to the public. 

The project is part of National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress to create a searchable online database of newspapers. Laing and other archivists contributed files to Chronicling America, which is now home to millions of pages of American newspapers published between 1789-1963. Laing’s position was seeded by a $209,000 grant from the Humanities Endowment. 

The UW Libraries grant has been renewed in the five years since, paying for Laing to facilitate the total addition of nearly 300,000 pages of Wyoming newspapers to the database. 

Last week, however, the grant was terminated as part of significant cuts made to the National Endowment for the Humanities by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. 

And Laing was abruptly out of a job. 

Though Laing’s own life and career have been disrupted by the sudden firing, the archivist is more concerned about the fate of the project. 

“I liked that the work seemed important,” said Laing, who uses they/them pronouns. “It felt like we were creating something that was going to be very helpful to a lot of people.”

The project is among the latest Wyoming casualties of DOGE, which Trump champions as a voter-backed effort to reduce federal bureaucracy and expenditures. DOGE cuts have resulted in an array of Wyoming impacts — from U.S. Forest Service employees losing their jobs in Jackson to federal office closures in Cheyenne and sudden funding cuts for organizations like Wyoming Humanities. 

For Laing, it all happened incredibly fast, and they are still reeling. They are also saddened to think about the scope of programming nationwide that was axed without preamble. 

“I’m just really disappointed that suddenly this federal agency that was dispersing grants to really amazing projects was just … washed away,” Laing said. 

Frozen, aborted

Last week’s cuts targeted two federal agencies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Studies. Actions included placing staff on administrative leave and cancelling grants, according to reports. 

The National Endowment for the Humanities was founded in 1965, under the same legislation that enacted the more well-known National Endowment for the Arts. The Humanities Endowment has awarded more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, universities, libraries and other organizations, according to its website.

A significant piece of the Humanities Endowment’s overall funding, 40%, goes to state humanities councils like Wyoming’s. Those councils act as umbrellas, partnering with other organizations to support cultural events or awarding grants to projects. Humanities councils in all 50 states received notice last week that their grants were being terminated, according to reports. 

“Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes,” read the letter that Wyoming Humanities received, adding “the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” 

NEH funding makes up 80% of Wyoming Humanities’ budget, covering staff expenses, travel, marketing and other operational costs for the nonprofit. Staff is reconsidering the group’s future in the wake of the change. 

Along with state councils, the Humanities Endowment funds individual projects in Wyoming. These include a recent grant to Meeteetse Museums to replace its roof and install solar panels and another grant to the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum to update Indigenous interpretation. Both were terminated, according to museum directors.

The federal agency also funded the UW Libraries grant. Laing’s first indication of trouble happened early Thursday, they said, when a person connected to a similar project in Florida contacted them asking if they knew what was going on. All that day, Laing heard grim updates from across the country from people who had been notified of cancelled grants. 

“So it was kind of like watching the dominoes fall, and I was just sort of waiting to get the news,” Laing said. Their supervisor delivered that news on Friday. “My job had just been dissolved.”

Keeping history alive  

Laing has spent much of the past five years in a windowless basement office, painstakingly digitizing microfilm newspapers for the project. It’s quiet work, and it suits them.  

Laing gathered microfilmed newspapers from the Wyoming State Archive and worked with vendors to digitize and format the files. The result is that issues of newspapers such as the Platte Valley Lyre, Cody Enterprise and Cheyenne Daily Leader are now on the database. They reach back to 1873, when in a June issue the Daily Leader announced Byer’s Hotel and French Restaurant in Cheyenne was back open following a remodel, and that in Chicago, railroad executive Horace Clark had fallen ill. 

With interest in genealogical research growing, Chronicling America eases access for amateur historians who no longer have to visit these libraries in person to scan microfilm records, Laing said.  

During each two-year grant cycle, Laing endeavored to digitize 100,000 pages. The project was nearing the end of its third grant cycle, with about 10,000 pages remaining to satisfy the goal, they said. 

Laing was actually planning to move on from the job at the end of the year. That fact may take some of the sting out of the loss, but still, they said, “there’s never a good time to lose your job.”

Since the termination notice arrived, Laing’s supervisors have been trying to come up with a plan and have been very supportive, they said. Laing and others are worried about the integrity of the collective work in the long run.

“For a long time, we thought that we were building something that was going to last,” Laing said, “and now for the last couple of days, we’ve been accounting for all of that data, just in case all of that work is lost.” 

Other impacts 

It has been less clear how cuts to the second federal agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will affect Wyoming. WyoFile requested an interview with State Librarian Abby Beaver and had not heard back by publication time. But in an open letter on its website, the Wyoming Library Association said IMLS funds are granted to the Wyoming State Library and pay for a statewide database, staff development and training opportunities. 

Last year, 633 nationwide grant recipients entered into legally binding agreements with IMLS, according to library advocacy group Every Library. “The sudden termination of these grants not only breaches these agreements but also undermines the essential services that libraries and museums provide to communities across the nation,” the organization said in a statement accompanying a petition. The petition oppose the “unlawful” actions. 

The National Humanities Alliance, meanwhile, rallied against the Humanities Endowment cuts. 

“We condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms,” the coalition of cultural advocacy groups said in a statement. “Cutting NEH funding directly harms communities in every state and contributes to the destruction of our shared cultural heritage.”

For Laing, the prevailing feeling is disappointment. They brought up a recent talk they gave to a Wyoming historical society, where members kept Laing and their supervisor late with questions. 

“They seemed really excited about the potential of the project,” Laing said, “and to know that that’s just something that might completely go away seems like a lot of wasted time and effort.”