Tracie Holder thought her production grant might be spared.

After President Donald Trump returned to office, the filmmaker heard rumors about the National Endowment for the Humanities potentially terminating grants awarded during the Biden administration, but she had been promised $485,000 in the final months of Trump’s first term. Surely this meant her documentary — about the Astor Place Riot, a deadly 1849 incident that started out as a squabble between competing performances of “Macbeth” — wouldn’t be targeted as objectionable, right?

But in early April, Holder found herself among the hundreds of NEH grant recipients to learn in an email from “Grant_Notifications@nehemail.onmicrosoft.com” that their funding was being terminated because it “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities,” according to an attached letter signed by acting chairman Michael McDonald. She wondered whether the NEH was swinging its ax without aim.

The film “is about Shakespeare, of all things,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s sort of hard to understand how that doesn’t align with the president’s priorities.”

It is notoriously difficult for documentaries to find financing, especially those outside of the celebrity or true-crime genres. The NEH – created in 1965 to promote the humanities, including organizations such as libraries, museums, public television and radio stations — has for decades been one of the most reliable sources of funding. The Washington Post spoke to six filmmakers impacted by the recent grant cancellations, as well as a few executives at leading documentary organizations — all of whom were alarmed by the sudden terminations. Some worry that history documentaries, which can take years to produce, could become a long-term casualty of the cuts.

The NEH has supported some of the most prominent history documentaries in recent American memory, including multiple projects from Ken Burns (“The Civil War,” “The Vietnam War”). The April grant cancellations occurred on the heels of other drastic cuts and executive orders targeting federally funded arts institutions, including the NEH and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Arts.

On May 2, the White House suggested eliminating both in a partial budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year.

Getting rid of these agencies “would be a loss for our entire nation,” Holder said. Understanding history is “essential for us to have context for how we got to where we are now.” In the past, she continued, the NEH has not been “ideologically driven. It has funded films about William Buckley. There are plenty of films they’ve funded that Republicans would embrace as well. [Grants] being terminated across the board with no sense that anybody even knew what the films were about, that was just random and went against the NEH’s own policies.”

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After her mother died more than three decades ago, Matia Karrell stumbled upon a photo of her dressed in some sort of militia uniform. Karrell had only ever pictured her as a waitress, so it surprised the filmmaker to find out that, during World War II, her mother had volunteered as a plane spotter for the Massachusetts Women’s Defense Corps, searching the skies for enemy planes. As the war progressed, some women even became pilots for the federal civil service.

Karrell was stunned. And with the already little-known history of female WWII aviators seemingly fading from public memory, she vowed to bring it to the screen.

Financiers were hesitant to back a scripted approach. So Karrell and producer Hilary Prentice decided a documentary feature might be a more viable option. They could rely on crowdfunding and personal investments to cover most production costs; a coveted grant from the NEH would push them over the finish line.

At least, that was the plan, until Karrell and Prentice found out in April that their grant was being terminated. As a result, the filmmakers lost access to $480,000 of the $600,000 they had been awarded last year to complete the costly postproduction process — once again stalling progress on the story Karrell has lived with for much of her life. She and Prentice were forced back to the drawing board.

“This is a fight for legacy,” a disappointed Karrell said. “Knowing their historical experience … affects the dignity and the glory of the actions of these women. We want this to stick in the memories of Americans. The only way to do that is to illustrate it, to film it, to give it its place.”

Karrell also noted that this year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII, the sort of patriotic story that doesn’t seem to conflict with the Trump administration’s ideals. “This is America’s history,” she said. “We’re not doing some little puff piece about a celebrity or a music person. We’re doing something that helps us complete the national identity.”

Prentice added that the NEH “is there to lift up our stories of who we are as a people and as a culture,” and the loss of funding will mean fewer viewpoints finding their way on screen. “I think the filmmakers who are applying, like us, are all drawn to stories that haven’t been told. Stories that round out the picture of who we are.”

Congress allotted $207 million to the NEH last year, which represented 0.003 percent of the federal budget. The public programs division, which oversees museum initiatives and media grants, received $15 million of that sum. In the emailed letter to Karrell and Prentice, which used the same language as letters sent to other grant recipients, the cancellations were described as “an urgent priority for the administration.” They were effective immediately, though recipients were allowed to hold onto the funds they withdrew before April.

In late April, several Democrats representing Massachusetts in Congress criticized the grant terminations in a letter to McDonald, the acting NEH chairman.

“This shortsighted action will save the United States what amounts to ‘a rounding error in the U.S. budget’ but will harm people, organizations, and communities throughout the country,” read the letter from lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Edward J. Markey, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Rep. Seth Moulton.

The NEH, which did not respond to The Post’s emailed request for comment on filmmakers’ concerns, also stated in these letters that it would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” In late April, the agency announced that it would join the NEA, which has also canceled existing grants and outlined new priorities, in allocating a total of $34 million toward the creation of life-size statues for a National Garden of American Heroes. Around $30 million will be coming from their 2025 fiscal year budgets.

“It’s so ridiculous,” said filmmaker Marisa Fox. “I think it’s complete baloney. It’s all smoke and mirrors.”

Fox, a longtime journalist, received two NEH grants for a documentary about her Jewish mother’s experiences during the Holocaust: a $75,000 development grant in 2021, and a production grant for just under $600,000 in 2023. Similar to Karrell’s story, Fox was surprised to learn of her mother’s secret past years after her death. While her mother had always maintained that she escaped Europe just before WWII, a diary entry written at a Nazi women’s camp revealed that she had, in fact, been subjected to unthinkable brutality. Fox used this shocking discovery as a lens through which to explore the trauma that survivors retained from their time in the women’s camps.

The production grant allowed Fox to conduct interviews with survivors and sift through 300 hours of footage, among other things. She was able to withdraw the funds before receiving notice of her grant’s cancellation, making the impact more symbolic, but has continued to advocate for her peers to get the money they need. In a twist, she said, the NEH announced May 8 that it would be distributing $9.55 million in new grants — of which there was only one documentary recipient, for a film about a teenager whose diary was recovered from Auschwitz.

Being awarded an NEH grant is “like a manna from heaven,” Fox said. “It can sustain you as a filmmaker in a way that no other grant has been able to. This was really worth the wait, and worth the hard work. It allowed me to make the kind of film I wanted to make.”

When it comes to documentaries, postproduction can be the most expensive stage. Yuriko Gamo Romer received a $600,000 grant last year for her documentary exploring U.S.-Japanese relations through their shared love of baseball, and its termination means she will have to work overtime to replace crew members she can no longer afford to pay and figure out how to compensate those who already did some work.

“Good editors are expensive,” Romer said. She would also need to pay the salaries of assistant editors. The project required a Japanese-fluent archival producer who could speak legalese overseas, not to mention money for the rights to that archival footage. Romer hired a composer to write an original score but also wanted to license existing music, which only meant more dollar signs. A graphic designer contributed illustrations and motion graphics, but they also needed someone to work on promotional materials. Speaking of which — the film will need a trailer once it’s completed, which requires a separate editor and an accompanying team.

Romer estimated her documentary’s budget at around $1 million, which means an NEH grant wouldn’t have been enough to complete the project — it rarely is. (It is also worth noting that grant recipients cannot draw from their awarded funds until they raise the rest of the money in their proposed budget.) But the NEH backing a project is a strong vote of confidence in a filmmaker, encouraging other financiers to come on board.

“When it comes down to it, they’re one of very few organizations that offers that kind of money for documentary films,” Romer said. “To have that go away means that there’s a large chunk of documentary filmmaking budgets that have to come from somewhere else.”

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Dominic Asmall Willsdon, executive director of the International Documentary Association, described this as “a very difficult moment in the documentary field.” He estimated in early May that about half the project leads who lost funding the previous month were members of his organization, which serves as an advocate, publication and source of community for filmmakers. While losing an NEH grant can be detrimental to individual careers, Willsdon said, the public should be just as concerned by the agency’s recent pivot in allocations.

“It’s painful if a documentary filmmaker can’t tell the story that they have, and it’s painful for the subjects if they have a story that should get out, but ultimately the big loss is to all of us as audiences,” he continued. “There are things we’re not going to know and understand.”

It can take weeks, months or in some cases even years to prepare an application for an NEH grant. The process is extensive and daunting, as applicants must prove their endeavor is worth spending taxpayer money on. Each thoroughly researched proposal — Fox said hers amounted to around 100 pages — is submitted by a sponsoring organization and must receive support from scholars who will serve as advisers on the project. Immy Humes, a filmmaker who has written applications for several different productions, said it is “almost like writing a book.”

Humes secured a $600,000 grant last year for a documentary about Shirley Clarke, a key figure in the rise of American independent cinema during the mid-20th century and a contemporary of John Cassavetes. She felt secure enough to clear her schedule to work on the film, turning down other opportunities to make money to support herself, and was therefore “utterly devastated” to learn of the grant’s termination.

“I’m a New Yorker, so I’ve known for years about Trump’s shenanigans of not paying his bills,” she said. “I felt like one of those people in Atlantic City — his contractors — who were stiffed. On that level of, ‘No, I had a contract with you. You contracted this grant.’” (As reported in The Post and elsewhere, several business owners and workers have over the years accused Trump of skipping out on payments for contracted labor.)

The NEH issued a news release in late April stating that it “cancelled awards that are at variance with agency priorities, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice,” rhetoric in line with the Trump administration’s criticism of its predecessor. On May 1, a trio of humanities organizations — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association — sued the NEH and U.S. DOGE Service, which has visited agencies to enforce the president’s Feb. 11 executive order to reduce the federal workforce.

“NEH is now left as a shell of the agency that Congress established and has consistently funded,” reads the complaint, which states that “the Trump Administration’s dismantling of NEH is unlawful many times over.”

Willson said the grant cancellations “are part of the Trump administration’s desire and need to undermine public knowledge.” Others who spoke with The Post gestured to Trump’s recent executive order calling for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop diverting federal funds to NPR and PBS. The president’s version of the 2026 budget would also cut off all federal funding to CPB, a nonprofit corporation.

Some organizations are feeling the compounded effect of the attacks on CPB, the NEA and the NEH. Stephen Segaller is the vice president of national programming at WNET, the PBS member station that produces the documentary series “American Masters,” a frequent distributor of projects funded by NEH grants. Some of the films are produced in house, and Segaller pointed to six different titles — including one about author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and another on the poet Mary Oliver — that were impacted by the recent grant cancellations.

“In public television, we don’t just work for the paycheck — in fact, it’s quite the opposite,” he said. “We work to produce content that nobody else will do, that’s needed by the community and that doesn’t make anybody a profit. That’s why all the people who work for me do what they do. They’re trying to make the media environment a little bit richer and a little more sophisticated and interesting for our fellow citizens.”

Jeff Bieber received his seventh NEH grant in 2023 for a documentary on Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political theorist known for work on Nazi totalitarianism. He was awarded nearly $700,000, and drew down his funds in February as soon as he heard rumors of the administration’s intentions. Without the NEH, Bieber said, he wouldn’t have the career he has today. With its support, he produced several documentary series for PBS that dove into the histories of communities that have shaped our diverse nation, including Jewish, Latino and Asian Americans.

He is struggling to process what might happen to the storied humanities institution.

“We’re living in a moment of crisis right now,” he said. “In the Hannah Arendt film, we deal with McCarthyism and Watergate — we’ve been through crises before. But right now, it does feel different. I feel that the future looks a little dark, but hopefully we can come together. People need to coalesce … to really fight for the things we value. Republicans, Democrats, independents. I think there’s a way forward.”