Scattered across mountainous Botetourt County, north of Roanoke and just east of the Virginia-West Virginia line, are four public libraries that are pretty popular. Last year, visits to those libraries — in person and via the web — exceeded the population of Botetourt, 34,000, by a factor of more than five.
This year, there may not be as much traffic.
That’s because — having been “absolutely DOGE-ed,” as the state’s librarian, Dennis Clark, put it — libraries in Botetourt and across Virginia, beginning this fall, are anticipating offering fewer services. It comes down to the loss of $4.3 million in federal aid — the balance of $9.7 million tagged for Virginia since September 2024 — that President Donald Trump, through a disputed executive order targeting funding for libraries, museums and minority-owned businesses, unilaterally erased as woke.
The money, steered to the Library of Virginia in Richmond through a small, Clinton-era agency, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, represents 16% of the state library’s budget and pays for homework help for students from kindergarten to college, data files, electronic subscriptions, e-books, guidance for veterans and other services that are shared by libraries all over the state.
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This allows libraries, particularly those in small towns and rural counties, to punch above their weight, often assisting low-income and working-class Virginians, many of them Black and brown, who haven’t the cash to purchase books, newspapers and magazines; to hire tutors or click on a subscription-based streaming service to watch a film that may be part of a school assignment.
The lost dollars — the attorneys general of some 20 blue states, including nearby Maryland and Delaware, earlier this month filed a lawsuit in Rhode Island federal court, challenging the agency’s shuttering — allowed libraries across the nation to function as more than bricks-and-mortar institutions.
The money supports their digital iteration — widely popular during the COVID-19 lockdown five years ago — and frees libraries to go to the people rather than the other way around. In the countryside, where web service may be spotty — say, Southside, along the North Carolina border, and far Southwest Virginia — libraries share with patrons electronic devices to access the internet, via laptop computer, and pull down online materials.
The loss of funding — and the accompanying loss of services, which will vary from library to library — means, “You’re removing access for people,” said Lisa Varga, a former Fredericksburg librarian who recently stepped down as executive director of the Virginia Library Association to take a senior policy position at the American Library Association.
Julie Phillips, the Vermont come-here who is library director in Botetourt — the county is named for one of Virginia’s 18th-century royal governors — said that three-quarters of the online resources available through the four-branch system’s website are financed by the Library of Virginia, 170 miles away. The state library supports 36 local library websites.
To continue these services at local expense beyond Oct. 1, when the federal money will have vanished, will require difficult decisions. For instance, Phillips said, that could require cutting her libraries’ collections of actual books and/or the audio versions: “We’re still figuring that out. … Which ones do we take away? It’s going to be a really hard choice.”
The Botetourt system, which includes a branch in tiny Fincastle that dates to the 1800s, reported more than 102,000 in-person visits in 2024. Combined with 19,000 visits via the web and 60,000 clicks to access e-books, magazines and films, total traffic topped 180,000. That’s, in effect, five-plus engagements with the library for each of the Republican-leaning county’s 34,000 residents.
Without these federal dollars, the state library — with an annual budget of $54 million, half of which comes from outside sources, such as the federal government — will be forced to shed staff. The library employs 140. That number includes not just book-dispensing librarians but historians, archivists and technicians. Much of their work is unknown to, or barely seen by, the public. It ranges from digitizing ancient records on crumbling paper to cataloging the records of Virginia governors, many of them now electronic.
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“There will be layoffs,” said Clark, who — in perhaps an odd commentary on the right-vs.-left bitterness that characterizes our times — grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, the first capital of the Confederacy, and is now taking a stand in its second, Richmond, against the conservative politics propelling these reductions. “The staff knows that. There is no other way to make up that much funding. There is no knight on a white horse at the state to save us.”
It won’t be the first Trumpian attack on the state library.
About the same time the Democratic attorneys general turned to a federal judge to preserve the Institute for Museum and Library Services — it dispensed more than $265 million nationally last year — the Library of Virginia announced it had been denied $834,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project on Richmond’s historic Black neighborhood, Jackson Ward, as well digitizing more than a century of Virginia newspapers, including those published in German, and discharge notices for World War II fighting men and women.
The loss for the library was a mere sliver of the $2.2 billion in multiyear NEH grants frozen by the White House.
Fifteen programs operated by the state library will go dark with the suspension of grants issued by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Among them: FindItVa, an online portal to multiple databases used by students and jobseekers; access to back-up materials for students’ summer reading assignments; the digital file of Virginia newspapers, and a document bank through which school kids can peruse significant state records as part of the Standards of Learning — the yardstick for measuring performance that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, an apologist for Trump’s aggressive cuts in federal spending and jobs, vowed to strengthen.
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In this statewide and legislative election year, the hits are getting the attention of Virginia politicians — mostly Democrats who control the General Assembly — and who warn that the state is unlikely to make up for them.
Should the economy slip into recession — and with Trump’s spending and job cuts portending potentially sharp declines in revenue — the state may have to use what extra cash it’s set aside to shore up, for example, Medicaid, a pricey health-care program for the poor that congressional Republicans want to cut to fund permanent tax cuts adopted during Trump’s first term.
“These cuts will have to be factored into the numerous other cuts,” said Sen. Ghazala Hashmi of Chesterfield County, a candidate for the Democratic lieutenant governor’s nomination and chair of the Education and Health Committee, which has jurisdiction over the state library. “It’s not going to be an easy decision. Every area is going to be in crisis.”
Jeff E. Schapiro (804) 649-6814