About 100 National Endowment for the Humanities employees to be laid off: union
"A major agency restructuring is underway without the appropriate planning needed to ensure the continuity of operations," the local said in a statement. "These drastic changes ... represent an existential threat to those institutions and individuals who rely on support from NEH to research, preserve, and interpret our shared heritage."
The NEH did not respond to a request for comment. Less than 60 employees are expected to remain. The agency has a 207 million U.S. dollars budget to fund humanities programs such as history, law, literature, philosophy, and linguistics.
In early April, NEH terminated more than 1,000 existing grants, including one for the National History Day competition and grants for state humanities councils in all 50 states. The agency has already quietly posted that roughly half of its funding opportunities will not be offered in the next fiscal year or will no longer be offered at all, reported USA Today about the development.
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Wang's hometown, Tongchuan City, is on the Loess Plateau. In the past, her family eked out a living on the meager income generated from their 30 mu (about 2 hectares) plot of land. 'I was in a boarding school between grade 7 and 9. I would take a bag of steamed buns from home to school with me every Sunday,' she said, adding that they were her food for the entire week. 'My biggest dream then was that one day, I do not have to eat dry, moldy buns.' Like many of her fellow villagers, she left education after middle school; instead, choosing to start earning money through farming and casual work. In the following years, constant improvements to agricultural mechanisation meant she spent less and less time in the field. With her newfound free time, Wang looked for other opportunities. On February 21, 2021, she made her way to Aidou Technology Co Ltd in the county seat of Yijun, for an interview she had secured thanks to a friend's recommendation. 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Headquartered in Hangzhou in China's AI heartland of Zhejiang Province, Aidou is the first AI data annotation enterprise in Tongchuan. Zhang shared that the local government invited technology enterprises to increase employment quality, revitalise the countryside and boost the local economy. Therefore, the company kept its recruitment standards relatively flexible, considering candidates of all ages. 'What we value most is patience and the ability to learn, because this is an industry that is constantly evolving,' she said. Wang works at a corn field in Guozhai Village of Yijun County, Tongchuan City of northwest China's Shaanxi Province on June 12, 2025. – Xinhua photo With a small population of only 72,000 people, Yijun was an underdeveloped county with much of its workforce choosing to leave for work opportunities. 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It fuses AI with 3D vision technology to detect surface defects as small as 0.15 millimeters, setting a new benchmark for precision in automotive quality control. "This fusion of AI and vision technology addresses a long-standing industry pain point," said Ge Junhui, an engineer with the company. "Automotive paints, prized for their high gloss, are notoriously difficult to inspect using traditional machine vision, which often falters under reflective surfaces." As a result, many manufacturers have long relied on manual inspections, a slow, labor-intensive process susceptible to inconsistencies. "Our solution helps automate one of the last strongholds of human-led quality assurance," Ge added. Meanwhile, an increasing number of automakers are bringing AI from behind the scenes to the center stage, turning its capabilities into standout features that consumers can see, feel and experience firsthand. One of the notable trendsetters is Guangzhou-based XPeng, which has laid a solid foundation for the AI revolution through its early deployment of AI across many product forms. "The next decade of the auto industry will be defined by the convergence of automobiles and AI," said He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of the automaker, earlier this year. At the company's booth at the third CISCE, the spotlight is on its newly launched G7 model, which features its self-developed Turing AI chips and an AR-HUD system co-developed with Huawei. According to the company, these advanced chips will enable the G7 to support Level 3 autonomous driving. The model also features an AI-supported chassis that scans road conditions 1,000 times per second and makes adaptive suspension adjustments, supporting early detection up to 200 meters ahead and lane-level bump perception and recording. 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