The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has restored a $750,000 grant to Philadelphia art museum Woodmere after the institution filed a lawsuit against the federal agency for canceling the grant abruptly and without explanation. The museum had requested a review of the cancelation, and sued last month only when it received no reply to any of its “non-litigious” efforts to get the funding restored. 

IMLS sent the museum a Letter of Reinstatement on September 4, according to Woodmere, reading, “The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has completed the termination review process and will be reinstating your federal grant. This action supersedes any previous notices you may have received related to grant termination.”

“We are thrilled to receive the news that the IMLS has reinstated this important grant, and we look forward to the critical work of preserving, conserving, and stewarding Woodmere’s collection for the benefit of the public,” said Woodmere director William Valerio in an emailed statement. IMLS did not answer requests for comment.

Woodmere’s Revoked IMLS Grant

The leadership at Woodmere might been forgiven for thinking that an upcoming display of its collection was exactly in line with what the Trump administration would like to see the nation’s museums celebrating. After all, the museum’s holdings include Gilbert Stuart portraits of America’s first president and artworks celebrating the nation as a “pure” and “worthy” ideal; the updated display was timed to America’s semiquincentennial. But it seemed they were wrong.

Weeks into Trump’s second term, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) abruptly revoked the substantial grant. The museum sued the administration in Eastern Pennsylvania district court to get it reinstated.

Filed August 26 and first reported by Bloomberg, the suit named as defendants Donald Trump; IMLS and its acting director, former employment lawyer Keith Sonderling; and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and its head, Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist who was closely involved with developing Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s project to advance radical right-wing priorities and reshape the federal government.

IMLS awarded the museum a Save America’s Treasures (SAT) grant in 2024. Noting that the museum’s collection was “nationally significant,” the agency gave $750,000, the maximum for such a grant. SAT was established in 1998 “to celebrate America’s premier cultural resources,” said the complaint. The museum raised private matching funds contingent on the promise of the government money. Based on that promise, the museum undertook an ambitious conservation project ahead of the 2026 celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial.

But on March 14, the president signed an executive order, “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” directing the IMLS to eliminate all grant programs not required by statute and reduce its functions to the degree allowable by law. Trump also ordered OMB to deny IMLS authorization to spend federal funds for any functions beyond the minimum required by statute, said the complaint. (The suit noted that the same day, the Senate passed and the president signed a continuing resolution for fiscal year 2025 that provided IMLS funding through September.) 

Woodmere’s Charles Knox Smith Hall. Courtesy Woodmere.

“The Save America’s Treasures (SAT) grant was awarded to Woodmere in 2024 exactly to celebrate and perpetuate those things which we pride in our cultural fabric—not just in Philadelphia—but across the USA,” said director and CEO William Valerio in an email on September 2. “When it was terminated in 2025, we made several requests for review by the IMLS and sought assistance from our elected officials. When we exhausted all non-litigious avenues for reinstatement, we filed our complaint. We remain committed to this action until the grant is fully restored—it is the only way that we can continue our critical work preserving, archiving, and conserving our museum collection for benefit of U.S. audiences.”

Trump went on to sign another executive order two weeks later to encourage museums to “remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage,” which the museum argues was precisely one of the objectives of the grant-supported project. The grant was also meant to establish new storage spaces and implement new storage practices; update the museum’s cataloguing system; and move, catalogue, and digitize works in the collection. 

Founded in 1939, the museum has a collection ranging from the 18th century to the present, comprising 10,000 works and telling an intergenerational story of the art of Philadelphia, a city often nicknamed “the cradle of liberty” for its starring role in the nation’s founding.

Woodmere’s grant application highlighted works by Philadelphia artists like Gilbert Stuart (the museum owns several of his portraits of George Washington) and Benjamin West (author of a famed portrait of Benjamin Franklin that hangs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art); the “preeminent version” of Hiram Powers’s allegorical sculpture America, which depicts the nation as “a pure ideal worthy of veneration and protection from secession”; various American landscapes; and a Sarah Fisher Ames bust of Abraham Lincoln. These works were planned to remind visitors “of America’s extraordinary heritage by displaying and making accessible its collection in a manner that will reflect the richness of American history.” 

Hiram Powers, America (1850–54; carved after 1854). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

But IMLS terminated the grant April 8 without explanation, saying only that the grant was “no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interests of the United States and the IMLS Program,” the same language used in numerous other emails to museums nationwide. By that time, the museum had already entered into numerous conservation contracts, often with independent contractors who are either self-employed or run small businesses, the suit noted.

Four days before IMLS terminated the grant, 21 state Attorneys General sued Donald Trump and high-ranking officials in his administration over the gutting of IMLS and other Congressionally mandated organizations.

“The IMLS’s letter caught Woodmere in midair,” noted the complaint, “and it has been scrambling ever since to keep our SAT project alive.” The institution has thus far received just $195,002 for expenses incurred. 

The museum asked Sonderling to renew the termination on May 8, the complaint said, but had received no answer to that request or follow-up inquiries. 

IMLS did not answer an email from Artnet News inquiring about Woodmere’s suit and about why the grant was canceled.

Other Reinstated IMLS Grants

The complaint noted that IMLS has reinstated previously terminated SAT grants in favor of two other local museums. Those are, per the Philadelphia Inquirer, Historic Germantown and the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel University. There is “no apparent reason,” said Woodmere, “why they received favorable treatment and Woodmere has not.”

The museum asked the court to stop implementation of the executive order; to declare the order to be “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act; and to declare that the refusal to disburse funds appropriated by Congress violates the Constitution’s separation of powers and the Take Care Clause, which entrusts the president to carry out the laws Congress enacts.

Established by Congress in 1996, IMLS accounts for just 0.0046 percent of the federal budget, but provides key support to museums and libraries nationwide. Congress reauthorized the act that created it most recently in a law signed by Trump during his first term, in 2018. Congress appropriated $294.8 million for IMLS in fiscal year 2025.

This story was originally published on September 3, 2025. It was updated on September 8, 2025, at 11.35 a.m. ET, to reflect the outcome of the lawsuit.