What Does This Election Mean for Your Library?

Heading into the 2024 election, school and public libraries were increasingly seeing challenges by book banners seeking to control what type of access the general public had to books. Books targeted often included those with LGBTQ+ characters or talked about sexual education, to name some of the main challenges. At the same time, school and public librarians were seeing increasingly harmful rhetoric that sometimes involved threats to either their jobs or their persons. It got so bad that librarian and mental health advocate Michael Threets resigned from his public library position, though he remains a strongly outspoken advocate.

The party largely behind the book banning movement won last week’s presidential election, which has a lot of library staff across the country asking what happens now. There are some good articles about that:

EveryLibrary Warns That U.S. Election Results Mean More Uncertainty for Libraries (Publisher’s Weekly)

“The library industry will need to do significant work over the next four years to mitigate potential cuts to library funding at the local, state, and federal levels,” the post concludes. “This will include organizing communities, providing resources to citizens to push back locally, and raising and spending significant funding on national campaigns to combat misinformation about the role of libraries in American society.”

This Election Should Not Determine the Fate of Libraries (But it Might Have) (EveryLibrary.org)

“Last night, American voters elected politicians who proposed defunding libraries while slandering library workers. The previous Trump administration proposed gutting federal funding for libraries every year he was in office.”

Election Impact: What Will a Second Trump Term Mean for Education and Libraries? (SLJ)

“Based on Project 2025 and campaign promises, here are the library and K–12 education issues we are watching and the stated goals and priorities of the incoming administration.

• Elimination of the Department of Education and any federal oversight of public schools.
• Elimination of Title I funding. The loss would impact 2.8 million children, according to the National Education Association, and lead to the loss of more than 180,000 teaching positions.
• Elimination of Head Start programs, which would impact 800,000 infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.
• State funding changes: While campaigning, Trump said that he would withhold education funding for Democratic-leaning states such as California and New York.
• End of Title IX executive order from President Biden that protected the rights of trans, gay, and lesbian students and expanded the definition of sexual assault. The regulation was not in effect nationwide, as many states were still fighting it in court at the time of the election.
• School choice: This would create federal policy to allow families to use public funds to pay for private school tuition and homeschooling.
• Continued attacks on libraries, librarians, books. Project 2025 makes allegations of criminal conduct by librarians, publishers, authors, and educators and argues in favor of criminal charges and incarceration.
• Elimination of the Institute for Museums and Library Services, which provides libraries with resources and grants.”

None of this, however, is a done deal. Government is participatory and there are actions that we can all take today to help protect the freedom to read. And the freedom to read IS important because being educated and informed is an important indicator for both personal and community success and stability. The access to information and the ability to detect and dismantle disinformation is also vital to an ongoing and thriving democracy. If we love our children, if we love our communities, and if we love our country, we should be using and supporting our libraries. The value that they can bring to the things we love is immeasurable.

Filed under: Advocacy, Library Advocacy