What does nearly every city and town in America have? Usually these four things:
Schools, libraries, post offices, and parks.
They are community centers, meeting places, places to share experiences, and, sometimes, lifelines. As Americans, we have come to think of them as essential to society at the local level, and an engrained element of our national identity. They are so central to our worlds, they are often referred to by their simple descriptions instead of their official names, and the meaning is always understood: I’m going to the library, the park, the post office, the school.
That is why it’s so baffling that they are all under threat. But then, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that prompted it is under the direction of a billionaire who thinks he needs none of them because he can, in one way or another, purchase all of them. After all, the implied introductory adjective in most of those examples is the word “public.” That word seems to really get the goat of DOGE.
What DOGE is doing, of course, has nothing to do with the E of its title: efficiency. After all, slashing a program doesn’t make it more efficient—it makes it disappear. It turns it out into the world of the private sector, available, if at all, only to those who can afford it.
The latest assault on our public good and goods is aimed at public libraries, with the decimation of the staff of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the cessation of grantmaking which last year provide $267 million to libraries and museums across the U.S. It’s one of seven agencies targeted in an executive order to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.” And state lawmakers and governors in some states are following up with their own proposed funding cuts and freezes.
As with many of the DOGE cuts, small towns and rural Americans will take a particular hit, as the institute’s focus has been on helping to organize book drives and museum field trips in places that don’t have libraries and museums.
To attack libraries, especially when done in tandem with defunding (i.e., continually underfunding) public education–seems particularly nefarious. An educated populace is capable of critical thinking—fundamental for a functioning democracy and a bulwark against totalitarianism. There was a reason Southern slave states (and a few northern states) had anti-literacy laws.
Libraries foster a literate population, and once a population is able to read, it can’t be easily controlled by the powerful. Libraries also foster community—they bring together disparate parts of society into one place. They are places where all people can learn new skills, access the internet to connect with the rest of the world, explore new jobs and careers, fill out tax forms, and Social Security, employment, and college applications, and, through non-fiction and fiction, understand and improve themselves and their world—or take the opportunity to escape it, if only for a few moments.
Until more recently, they’ve enjoyed broad and bipartisan support, as their ubiquity would seem to indicate. But that has changed, as activists have accused libraries of injecting “woke” ideology into our communities and called for slashing budgets and banning books.
The billionaires supporting DOGE cuts seem to believe they themselves have no need for public things. They have estates rivaling some national parks, and certainly dwarfing community parks. They can use private jets and drones—and a hive of robots and human worker bees—to have packages flown across a continent. They can amass libraries and art collections that match the quality of the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum.
And perhaps they think a less educated public is better for them: customers who are easier to manipulate, workers who are better to subjugate. But a public without access to public things—like decent schools and libraries, fresh air and places for recreation, ways to connect with family, friends, and opportunities—whether through the postal service or WiFi—becomes restless and discontented. The cuts to public things will widen the wealth gap even further, pushing the super wealthy further and further away from the rest of us.
But even if our libraries were reduced to keeping mainly the nation’s foundational documents on its shelves, the billionaires supporting DOGE should still be able to learn two important lessons—or rather warnings: Those with little have little to lose, and those who have been repeatedly misled will eventually wise up.
Donald Cohen
Executive Director
Jeff Hagan
Communications Director