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Libraries across the United States are cutting back on e-books, audiobooks, and loan programs after the Trump administration suspended millions of dollars in federal grants as it tries to dissolve the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Federal judges have issued temporary orders to block the Trump administration from taking any further steps toward gutting the agency. But the unexpected slashing of grants has delivered a significant blow to many libraries, which are reshuffling budgets and looking at different ways to raise money. Maine has laid off a fifth of its staff and temporarily closed its state library after not receiving the remainder of its annual funding. Libraries in Mississippi have indefinitely stopped offering a popular e-book service, and the South Dakota state library has suspended its interlibrary loan program. E-book and audiobook programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts, even though those offerings have exploded in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. I think everyone should know the cost of providing digital sources is too expensive for most libraries,” said Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association. Its a continuous and growing need. Library officials caught off guard by Trump’s cuts President Donald Trump issued an executive order March 14 to dismantle the IMLS before firing nearly all of its employees. One month later, the Maine State Library announced it was issuing layoff notices for workers funded through an IMLS grant program. It came as quite a surprise to all of us, said Spencer Davis, a library generalist at the Maine State Library who is one of eight employees who were laid off May 8 because of the suspended funding. In April, California, Washington, and Connecticut were the only three states to receive letters stating the remainder of their funding for the year was canceled, Hohl said. For others, the money hasnt been distributed yet. The three states all filed formal objections with the IMLS. Rebecca Wendt, California state library director, said she was never told why California’s funding was terminated while the other remaining states did not receive the same notice. We are mystified, Wendt said. The agency did not respond to an email seeking comment. Popular digital offerings on the chopping block Most libraries are funded by city and county governments, but receive a smaller portion of their budget from their state libraries, which receive federal dollars every year to help pay for summer reading programs, interlibrary loan services, and digital books. Libraries in rural areas rely on federal grants more than those in cities. Many states use the funding to pay for e-books and audiobooks, which are increasingly popular, and costly, offerings. In 2023, more than 660 million people globally borrowed e-books, audiobooks, and digital magazines, up from 19% in 2022, according to OverDrive, the main distributor of digital content for libraries and schools. In Mississippi, the state library helped fund its statewide e-book program. For a few days, Erin Busbea was the bearer of bad news for readers at her Mississippi library: Hoopla, a popular app to check out e-books and audiobooks had been suspended indefinitely in Lowndes and DeSoto counties due to the funding freeze. People have been calling and asking, Why cant I access my books on Hoopla? said Busbea, library director of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System in Columbus, a majority-Black city northeast of Jackson. The library system also had to pause parts of its interlibrary loan system allowing readers to borrow books from other states when they aren’t available locally. For most libraries that were using federal dollars, they had to curtail those activities,” said Hulen Bivins, the Mississippi Library Commission executive director. States are fighting the funding freeze The funding freeze came after the agency’s roughly 70 staff members were placed on administrative leave in March. Attorneys general in 21 states and the American Library Association have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration for seeking to dismantle the agency. The institute’s annual budget is below $300 million and distributes less than half of that to state libraries across the country. In California, the state library was notified that about 20%, or $3 million, of its $15 million grant had been terminated. The small library systems are not able to pay for the e-books themselves, said Wendt, the California state librarian. In South Dakota, the state’s interlibrary loan program is on hold, according to Nancy Van Der Weide, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Department of Education. The institute, founded in 1996 by a Republican-controlled Congress, also supports a national library training program named after former first lady Laura Bush that seeks to recruit and train librarians from diverse or underrepresented backgrounds. A spokesperson for Bush did not return a request seeking comment. Library funding is never robust. It’s always a point of discussion. It’s always something you need to advocate for, said Liz Doucett, library director at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine. It’s adding to just general anxiety.” Nadia Lathan, Associated Press/Report for America Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
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Federal judge and Trump appointee Matthew J. Kacsmaryk issued a ruling on Friday that will significantly alter the protections that transgender employees are entitled to in the workplace. The decision impacts the current guidance on workplace harassment from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in a move that reflects the agency’s new priorities under the Trump administration and new acting chair Andrea Lucas. In the ruling, Kacsmaryk struck down a section of the EEOC’s guidance that applied to transgender and gender-nonconforming workers, arguing the agency did not have the authority to foist those guidelines on employers. The agency’s guidance had stated that misgendering employees, denying them access to appropriate bathrooms, or barring them from dressing in line with their gender identity could constitute workplace harassment. Updates to workplace harassment guidance The EEOC had updated its guidance on workplace harassment last year for the first time in decades, following a major Supreme Court ruling in 2020 that codified workplace protections for LGBTQ+ employees. (Over the last two years, the agency has also fielded well over 6,000 charges that alleged discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.) But Kacsmaryk ruled that the agency’s interpretation of the Supreme Court decision was too broad and imposed “mandatory standards” on employers, contradicting the EEOC’s claim that the guidance was not legally binding. Kacsmaryk also cited the “biological differences between men and women” and said the EEOC’s guidance contravenes Title VIIs plain text by expanding the scope of sex beyond the biological binary.” A new administration’s priorities Trump had already undermined protections for LGBTQ+ workers in one of his first executive orders, which dictated that the government would only recognize two biological sexes. And even prior to this ruling, the new administration had already influenced the EEOC’s priorities: In her new capacity as acting chair, Lucas said the agency would now focus on defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights” and complying with Trump’s executive orders. Over the last few months, there have been several reports that the EEOC is dismissing lawsuits that were already underway involving allegations of discrimination against trans or gender-nonconforming workers. The agency is also reportedly de-prioritizing new charges related to gender identity and discouraging EEOC judges from hearing existing cases that are under investigation. (The EEOC has not commented on these reports.) Since Trump dismissed EEOC commissioners Jocelyn Samuels and Charlotte Burrows, the agency has lacked a quorum and been unable to make formal revisions to its guidanceincluding the workplace harassment guidelines, which Lucas had voted against when they were issued in 2024. Earlier this month, however, Trump nominated a new commissioner who would secure a Republican majority at the EEOC if confirmed, enabling the agency to revoke prior guidance and make other consequential changes to worker protections.
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President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke for more than two hours Monday, after the White House said the U.S. leader has grown frustrated” with the war in Ukraine. Trump planned a separate call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy in hopes of making progress toward a ceasefire. After the call, Putin said Russia was ready to continue discussing an end to the fighting, but he indicated there was no major breakthrough in what he termed a very informative and very frank conversation with Trump. Putin said the warring countries should find compromises that would suit all parties. At the same time, I would like to note that, in general, Russias position is clear. The main thing for us is to eliminate the root causes of this crisis, the Russian president said. The White House did not immediately provide its own account of the call. Trump has struggled to end a war that began with Russias invasion in February 2022. That makes these conversations a serious test of his reputation as a deal maker after having claimed he would quickly settle the conflict once he was back in the White House, if not even before he took office. Trump expressed his hopes for a productive day Monday and a ceasefire in a social media post over the weekend. His effort will also include calls to NATO leaders. But ahead of the call, Vice President JD Vance said Trump is more than open to walking away from trying to end the war if he feels Putin isn’t serious about negotiation. Hes grown weary and frustrated with both sides of the conflict, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday ahead of the call. He has made it clear to both sides that he wants to see a peaceful resolution and ceasefire as soon as possible. The Republican president is banking on the idea that his force of personality and personal history with Putin will be enough to break any impasse over a pause in the fighting. Id say were more than open to walking away, Vance told reporters before leaving Rome after meeting with Pope Leo XIV. Vance said Trump has been clear that the U.S. is not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes. Trump’s sensibilities are that hes got to get on the phone with President Putin, and that is going to clear up some of the logjam and get us to the place that we need to get to, said Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff. I think its going to be a very successful call. Trump’s frustration builds over failure to end war Still, there are fears that Trump has an affinity for Putin that could put Ukraine at a disadvantage with any agreements engineered by the U.S. government. Bridget Brink said she resigned last month as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine “because the policy since the beginning of the administration was to put pressure on the victim Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia. Brink said the sign that she needed to depart was an Oval Office meeting in February where Trump and his team openly berated Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently deferential to them. I believe that peace at any price is not peace at all, Brink said. Its appeasement, and as we know from history, appeasement only leads to more war. Trump’s frustration about the war had been building before his post Saturday on Truth Social about the coming calls. Trump said his discussion with Putin would focus on stopping the bloodbath of the war. It also will cover trade, a sign that Trump might be seeking to use financial incentives to broker some kind of agreement after Russia’s invasion led to severe sanctions by the United States and its allies that have steadily eroded Moscow’s ability to grow. Trump’s hope, according to the post, is that a war that should have never happened will end. Vance said Trump would press Putin on whether he was serious about negotiating an end to the conflict, saying Trump doesnt believe he is and that Trump may wash his hands of trying to end the war. It takes two to tango, Vance said, adding that if Russia is not willing to do that, then were eventually just going to have to say, this is not our war. Its Joe Bidens war, its Vladimir Putins war.” His treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that Trump had made it clear that a failure by Putin to negotiate in good faith could lead to additional sanctions against Russia. Bessent suggested the sanctions that began during the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden were inadequate because they did not stop Russia’s oil revenues, due to concerns that doing so would increase U.S. prices. The United States sought to cap Russia’s oil revenues while preserving the country’s petroleum exports to limit the damage from the inflation that the war produced. No ceasefire but an exchange of prisoners Putin recently rejected an offer by Zelenskyy to meet in-person in Turkey as an alternative to a 30-day ceasefire urged by Ukraine and its Western allies, including Washington. Instead, Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Istanbul for talks, the first such direct negotiations since March 2022. Those talks ended Friday after less than two hours, without a ceasefire in place. Still, both countries committed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, with Ukraines intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, saying on Ukrainian television Saturday that the exchanges could happen as early as this week. While wrapping up his four-day trip to the Middle East, Trump said Friday that Putin had not gone to Turkey because Trump himself wasn’t there. He and I will meet, and I think well solve it or maybe not, Trump told reporters after boarding Air Force One. At least well know. And if we dont solve it, itll be very interesting. Zelenskyy met with Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Rome on Sunday, as well as European leaders, intensifying his efforts before the Monday calls. The Ukrainian president said on the social media site X that during his talks with the American officials, they discussed the negotiations in Turkey and that the Russians sent a low level delegation of non-decision-makers. He also said he stressed that Ukraine is engaged in real diplomacy to have a ceasefire. We have also touched upon the need for sanctions against Russia, bilateral trade, defense cooperation, battlefield situation and upcoming prisoners exchange, Zelenskyy said. Pressure is needed against Russia until they are eager to stop the war. The German government said Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French, British and Italian leaders spoke with Trump late Sunday about the situation in Ukraine and his upcoming call with Putin. A brief statement gave no details of the conversation, but said the plan is for the exchange to be continued directly after the Trump-Putin call. Witkoff spoke Sunday on ABC’s This Week and Brink appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation. Josh Boak and Zeke Miller, Associated Press
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