Indiana Just Defunded Its History. What's Next?

Inside the state's decision to kneecap the Historical Bureau and why it affects all of us more than you'd think

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JUNE 16, 2025

It wasn't all that long ago that the Indiana Historical Bureau counted eight employees among its team — a collection of trained and passionate historians and communicators whose job was to make the state's history accessible and available to nearly seven million Hoosiers.

You're probably familiar with some of their work. The IHB helps to oversee the state's Historical Marker Program, vetting applicants and doing the rigorous research to make sure that every word on those iconic placards is right and true. The Historical Bureau also oversees the digitization efforts around Indiana Memory and Hoosier State Chronicles — making available for free more than 1.5 million pages of historic newspapers from 58 counties across the state.

Or at least they used to.

Caught up in the crossfire of aggressive and uncompromising budget cuts, the state of Indiana effectively wiped out the Indiana Historical Bureau.

No part of that previous sentence is sensationalized or hyperbolic. If anything, it's an understatement.

There's only one employee left.

The Indiana Historical Bureau has existed to shepherd and steward the state's history for more than 100 years, first as an independent agency, then as a division of the State Library for the better part of the last decade. The bureau's core functions have not changed so long as the organization has existed — they keep, protect, and share our history. Their employees have been researchers, storytellers, communicators, and archivists. Now, the one employee that they have left has to be all of those things all at the same time.

“I almost feel worse for her than I do for myself,” said one former employee, who preferred to remain anonymous. “It's an impossible job for one person.”

Maybe that's exactly the point.

The Historical Bureau is not an optional part of our state government, nor is it a luxury.

It's a requirement by Indiana State Law. According to Indiana Code, the Bureau must operate as a division of the state library, tasked with editing, publishing, and promoting materials related to Indiana's history. The law also mandates the continuation of the Historical Marker Program and requires the Bureau to run the program.

Of course, there are no laws on the books that define how robust the program has to be or how many people the Bureau has to employ. Wiping out the Bureau's staff while leaving the Bureau technically intact certainly seems like the most legal way to make sure that it can't get its work done, and Hoosiers would be right to wonder why the Governor's office is so concerned with making sure its history isn't so accessible.

The Governor's office says that these layoffs are purely budgetary and not politically motivated. They've said that the core functions of the Historical Bureau will be preserved through other agencies, but they've also visited those other agencies with the very same kinds of devastating layoffs.

The Bureau may still exist according to the most technical interpretation of the law, but its mission has been kneecapped. There is no scenario in which Hoosier history is kept, shared, and protected with the same level of vigilance and excellence that the Historical Bureau has offered for more than a century.

Many of the Bureau's former employees are grieving this loss even more than the loss of their own jobs and livelihoods.

“We used to do a dozen or more historical markers every year,” said one former employee. “It's hard to imagine doing more than two or three anymore. That means a lot of lost stories. It's tragic.”

There's a sound Libertarian argument to be made that perhaps the government should have never been in the public history business to begin with — that private individuals and nonprofit organizations should be the ones who tell, keep, and preserve the stories that matter. After all, we like Historical Markers, but someone else can make those, can't they?

Nope.

Buried in that Indiana Code is the sneaky — and once upon a time, well-meaning — caveat that the only the Historical Bureau can approve or allow the erection of new Historical Markers. It is the Bureau's job to vet the historical importance of every application, and to painstakingly do the research to ensure that every word on the thing is provably and verifiably accurate. The law provides no allowance for any other entity — at any other level of government — to do this work.

At least when it comes to Historical Markers, the State of Indiana has decided that it doesn't want the Historical Bureau telling very many stories anymore — and that it doesn't want anyone else telling them either. If your city or county decides it wants to step up to continue the work that the Historical Bureau will no longer be able to do, they are, by law, not allowed to do so. Local municipalities can erect “interpretative signage”, but nothing that comes with the same prestige, permanence, or historical weight as an official Historical Marker.

All fifty states have historical marker programs. None of them have ever been gutted like this before.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
~George Orwell, 1984