# Institute of Museum and Library Services A small independent federal agency created in **1996** by the Museum and Library Services Act — the primary source of federal support for the nation's libraries and museums. Most of its money moves as **Grants to States** formula funding administered by state library agencies, which means its budget reaches essentially every congressional district. It is one of the smallest line items in the federal budget and one of the most thoroughly documented cases of attempted agency elimination by executive action. ## The 2025 dismantlement attempt - **14 March 2025** — **Executive Order 14238**, "Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy," names seven agencies including IMLS and directs that their **non-statutory components and functions be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with law**, with staffing reduced to the statutory minimum. - **15 March 2025** — Congress passes a continuing resolution **funding IMLS through September 2025**. The appropriation and the elimination order are in force simultaneously. - **31 March 2025** — effectively the **entire staff**, roughly 75 people, is placed on paid administrative leave; all but about a dozen receive notice of an agency-wide reduction in force set for 4 May. - **Litigation** — *Rhode Island v. Trump* results in a ruling reinstating the agency. On **6 April 2026** a federal court approves the administration's request to **withdraw its appeal**, leaving the reinstatement in place. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It is the cleanest worked example of dismantlement-by-staffing.** The vault's [[How a Federal Agency Is Dismantled]] page already uses IMLS as its case study, and the reason is that nothing here required repealing the statute. The Museum and Library Services Act remained law throughout. What changed was that the people who execute it were removed. **An agency with no staff performs no functions regardless of what its organic statute says** — which is the same route-around-the-mechanism pattern the vault documents at [[Preclearance]] and in the [[American Bar Association]]'s ratings role. **2. The appropriation/elimination collision is the constitutional question.** Congress appropriated money for the agency the day after the President ordered it reduced to a statutory minimum. That is the impoundment problem in miniature — whether an executive may decline to spend or staff what Congress has funded — and it is why GAO Impoundment Control Act findings are the thing to watch rather than the executive order itself. **3. The withdrawn appeal is the tell.** An administration that believed it would win generally does not abandon the appeal. Dropping it leaves the reinstatement standing without producing an appellate precedent that would bind future attempts — which preserves the option to try again on different facts. **4. Federal support for libraries is a soft target with a hard constituency.** IMLS funding is small enough to be dismissed as trivial and distributed widely enough that eliminating it closes services in rural districts held by both parties. That combination is why it survives, and it is the same structural logic that has protected [[Head Start]]. > [!warning] Current state not verified > Post-reinstatement staffing levels, FY2026 and FY2027 appropriations, and whether the agency is operating at normal capacity were **not verified** for this page. Confirm before describing its present condition. ## See Also - [[How a Federal Agency Is Dismantled]] — the pattern IMLS exemplifies - [[National Endowment for the Arts]] — the adjacent cultural agency - [[Head Start]] — the same distributed-constituency survival logic - [[Government Accountability Office]] — Impoundment Control Act findings