Biden handed two professors $60,000 each to write books about LGBTQ cartoonists and "multiethnic graphic literature."
But Trump's team just canceled both grants.
And now neither professor will return calls.
What Biden's NEH Actually Funded
The National Endowment for the Humanities quietly awarded $120,000 in taxpayer money in the final weeks of the Biden presidency – two $60,000 grants that had nothing to do with American history, national defense, or anything your neighbor would recognize as a public good.
The first went to Margaret Alice Galvan, an English professor at the University of Florida.
Her project, Comics in Movement, was described as examining "how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s."
The second went to Maite Urcaregui, an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at San José State University.
Her project, Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature, planned to "analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors" to "underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions."
Both grants were approved in the final days of 2024 – and terminated by Trump's NEH in April 2025.
Fox News requested comment from the NEH, Galvan, and Urcaregui.
None of them responded.
DOGE Found $163 Million More Where That Came From
These two grants are not the story.
They are the tip of the iceberg.
DOGE went through Biden's NEH grant portfolio and found $163 million in taxpayer money funding projects like this – including $350,000 for "interactive gay travel guides," $247,000 to digitize "stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest," and $75,000 to study "the relationship between internet live streaming and LGBTQ+ communities."
https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2026786787717230650?s=20
An online database now tracks 1,435 canceled NEH grants totaling over $427 million.
Every dollar of it awarded under Biden.
Here is the number that should make your blood boil: Biden's NSF spent $290 million on DEI grants in 2024 alone.
When Biden took office in 2021, that number was $14 million.
He grew DEI grant spending at the National Science Foundation by nearly 2,000 percent in four years – while nearly one-third of American public school children finished the 2024 school year behind grade level.
Biden's FY2024 budget also requested $42 million to expand a brand-new Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility inside the NEH itself.
They were building the machine to keep this going forever.
Trump Shut the Machine Down
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order ending what he called "radical and wasteful" DEI programs across the entire federal government.
The NEH followed with its own announcement: future grants would be merit-based, focused on America's founding principles, and awarded to projects that reject ideologies built around race or gender.
Merit-based. Pro-America. No extreme ideologies.
A federal judge tried to pause some cancellations in July – but on March 15, a court stayed that injunction, and the Trump administration's priorities moved forward.
The academics lost in court and they still won't pick up the phone.
Your Money, Their Agenda
There is no charitable reading of what Biden did here.
A professor at San José State promised to use a "queer formalist approach" to critique "citizenship's inconsistencies" – and walked away with $60,000 of your money.
Nobody voted for that.
Biden's team just assumed they could keep shoveling money to progressive academics forever – awarding identity-driven grants in the final days of a failed presidency, counting on bureaucratic inertia to protect it from whoever came next.
DOGE showed up with a spreadsheet and canceled every last one.
That is the difference between an administration that spent four years spending your money on its friends – and one that's spending its time giving it back.
Sources:
- Rachel del Guidice, "Trump admin pulls $120K in grants for research on LGBTQ cartoonists, 'multiethnic' studies, report says," Fox News, March 10, 2026.
- "Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing," The White House, January 20, 2025.
- "An Update on NEH Funding Priorities," National Endowment for the Humanities, April 24, 2025.
- "NEH Implementation of Recent Executive Orders," National Endowment for the Humanities, March 15, 2026.
- "DOGE Cancels Multiple NEH Grants Approved by Biden," Breitbart / Resist the Mainstream, May 24, 2025.
- "Biden-Harris Administration's Fiscal Year 2024 Budget includes $211 million for NEH," National Endowment for the Humanities.
- David Ditch, "Trump pause on federal payouts hits Biden's big spending on DEI and climate change," Washington Times, January 29, 2025.