Madison Children’s Museum: Federal Gov’t Owes Us $268,000

MADISON, Wis. (WMDX) – The Madison Children’s Museum will miss out on a federal grant due to cuts from the Trump administration. 

About a year ago, the Madison Children’s Museum was awarded a $268,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The museum was one of five institutions chosen for this Climate Smart grant, which would help sustainability efforts. 

Staff from the museum said that money would make a difference beyond just Madison. The children’s museum here leads a consortium of seven family-focused institutions across the country, called the Caretakers of Wonder cohort. They work together on projects to make it more economical, and to make it easier for each other to make improvements or try new things. 

This consortium of museums would use the money from the Climate Smart grant to hire experts who would assess each of their greenhouse gas emissions, and vulnerability to climate change. Then, they’d create plans to get to Net Zero emissions. The museums would work together and share information to maximize the impact of that money. 

Federal grants take a long time to get approved, and then later disbursed. Often, organizations get the approval, and once it’s confirmed that they’ll get this money down the line, they start working on projects, and document what they’re doing. That way they show what they’ve done to spend money, and will get reimbursed by the federal government later. 

Staff at the Madison Children’s Museum said they’ve already started the project. Last week, they got an email saying their grant was terminated. Museum leaders said they haven’t seen a dime of that $268,000. 

On top of that, museum staff said the message didn’t use the government web portal, like all other official communication about grants. They say it didn’t even come from an email address that ended in “.gov”. That’s so unusual that the email first went into the spam folder. 

Museum staff said in a statement “illegal attacks will not deter us from upholding our responsibilities to the partners, organizations, and communities we are serving in this project.”