The National Endowment for the Humanities began in the 1960s under President Lyndon Johnson.

It's helped fund events focused on history, education, and literacy throughout the U.S..

But now Doe's is cutting funding, and the Kentucky humanities has lost about 70% of its budget.

We spoke with the director and board chair to see where things go from here.

We've been operating in Kentucky for 53 years.

The humanities councils around the country, there are 56.

There are, is a council in every state, and there are others in U.S. territories, do a variety of programs, around their territories and around their states that range from literacy and history projects, to a variety of programs that might be, as we do here, book festivals, the, providing of, books and authors to schools.

A variety of programs that we provide.

Many of our programs are designed to focus on, rural communities, particularly the museum on main, Smithsonian exhibit.

It's a traveling exhibit that we we put into smaller towns.

We weren't given a reason.

And the the strange, and but interesting fact about that is that, Congress appropriates the budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities every year, we receive roughly $850,000, for our yearly budget, from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We are working now under a budget, which was passed by Congress for, the 2025, fiscal year.

And, last week, the Department of Government Efficiency, personnel visited NIH and froze all the funds, laid off, 80% of the NIH staff.

And we're not allowed to receive any of the rest of our funding that we were going to operate on administratively in our programs for the remainder of the year.

We grant that money out through Kentucky humanities to museums and cultural centers who might have been damaged by the funding.

We don't have that those dollars today to do that.

The floods that have just recently, been in many parts of the state of Kentucky are, are they're devastated by what's happened to them.

We normally are in a position to help them.

This year we can't we're going to try very hard to continue our programs as best we can.

They might look different, and there might not be as many people, involved in the future, but we're going to, at least our plans right now.

We're not going to give up.

We're not going to give in.

We're going to hopefully count on Congress to appropriate those funds for us to continue to operate for another 53 years.

And you'll recall that Bill Goodman was a longtime host and producer here.

Kentucky Humanities hopes its programs like the Kentucky Book Festival, Kentucky Reads, and the Museum on Main Smithsonian exhibit will be able to continue.