In March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic upended the world for Americans and American museums, my job shifted from focusing on the far future to the immediate present. As museum leaders struggled with urgent decisions about keeping people safe, protecting their staff’s health and jobs, and keeping their organizations afloat, I tried to help us all envision what the world might be like next week, next month or next year. I am proud and humbled that many people have told me that the resulting series of scenarios provided practical advice that helped museum people cope with the crisis.

Terrible as the pandemic was, from my perspective as a futurist, the current situation is worse. The COVID crisis was shaped by a manageable set of variables: national and local rates of infection, hospitalization, and vaccination; mandates from local, state, or federal government or parent organizations about opening or closing, masking, and sanitation; and the availability of financial relief from federal, state, or local governments. There were challenges, to be sure (vaccine denial, rumors of bogus miracle cures, conspiracy theories), but it was possible to focus on a few key indicators and create rational contingency plans. Now there are so many variables, so few constraints on what could happen, and so little data on which to base decisions, that even contingency planning seems like a stretch goal. And this time around, the federal government, rather than providing financial assistance to buoy organizations through the crisis, is advancing policies that can actively inflict harm.

I’ve come to the painful conclusion that, given the current levels of disruption, it may not be possible to write stories that encompass all the possible futures we face at this time. Instead of offering a set of scenarios, in this post I’m going to share my emerging thoughts about some things that might help museums through the current disruptions and uncertainties around funding and government policies.

The Timeline of the Future Has Collapsed

The traditional foresight Cone of Plausibility assumes the world tomorrow will operate much like it does today.

While significant disruptions (e.g., the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic) may create large-scale short-term change, they don’t catapult us into a fundamentally different world. Major shifts in what is plausible, or even possible, evolve over years, decades, or even centuries.

Now it feels like a more accurate depiction of potential futures looks like this:

 

I’ve dubbed this the Hemisphere of Who the Heck Knows. Rather than “tomorrow being more or less like today, with small changes,” we wake up every day to news that rockets us in unexpected directions. Scenarios are supposed to collapse potential futures into a manageable number of possibilities and provide a framework for planning how you might respond. But in the new hemisphere, it is hard to identify a “manageable number of possibilities,” and with circumstances changing radically from hour to hour, difficult to provide a stable framework for response. Rather than being able to track a set of key variables, with clear inflection points, many mornings we confront an entirely new set of issues with enormous implications. The limits of what’s possible have radically changed, with the “rules” governing many areas of practice (notably politics, policy, funding, and regulation) rendered moot. Everything other than physical laws like gravity or Planck’s constant seems to be open to question.

How can we manage amid an unmanageable level of uncertainty? Can we create any “stories of the future” that are helpful guides to this vast new chronography?

Living in a Wild Future

It’s not like we’ve never explored the unlikely hinterlands of time, stories that lie in the outermost zone of the traditional Cone of Plausibility. Such “wild card” scenarios describe futures that challenge fundamental assumptions about what the world will be like. What if we learn to upload our consciousness to the cloud, making us functionally immortal? What if a combination of accumulated risk and massive disruptions effectively destroys the world’s digital infrastructure, triggering what internet pioneer Vint Cerf has dubbed a “digital dark age?” In the past, I’ve developed such scenarios as thought exercises to challenge museums’ expectations and spur creative thinking. Now some of these wild cards have moved from the edge of what’s plausible to deep in the center of the Hemisphere of Who the Heck Knows.

For example, in 2018, a group of museum people helped me develop a scenario set in 2040, in which pandemic disease and economic collapse lead the government to strip most nonprofits, including museums, of their tax-exempt status. We envisioned this future not to scare or titillate, but to explore issues that many organizations are confronting in the present: How can museums take a more entrepreneurial approach to financial planning? How can we ensure that museums are so valued in society, their contributions so widely recognized, that this scenario goes from unlikely to impossible?

Now some signals suggest that a scenario in which nonprofits could effectively lose their tax-exempt status is becoming more plausible. For example:

• Last fall, House Republicans introduced legislation that would allow the executive branch to revoke the nonprofit status of any organization it deemed to be “terrorist supporting.” Democrats warned at the time that this act could be used by a president to strip nonprofit status from groups they see as political opponents.
• The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has threatened to use its back-end access to the federal payment system (currently blocked by a federal judge) to withhold funding from Lutheran service groups that help resettle refugees, accusing them of “money laundering.”
• The Executive Order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” requires the Attorney General and all agencies to identify “up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.” It is not clear what constitutes a “large nonprofit,” what such an investigation would entail, or the potential consequences.
• The Tax Foundation has proposed that all non-charitable income be taxed at the corporate tax rate of 21 percent. (Some of this group’s recommendations were incorporated into the Project 2025 plan that seems to be guiding Trump’s first 100 days.)

Based on these signals and my own dark imaginings, I could easily write a scenario, perhaps titled “Nonprofit No More,” in terrifyingly plausible detail. But would dark scenarios like that be helpful right now in identifying any short-term responses? After much reflection, I’d like to make the case that they can.

The Psychological and Practical Benefits of Dark Imaginings

Dark scenarios can help us manage our greatest fears about the future. Creating a dumping ground for pessimistic musings can be the psychological equivalent of lancing a boil. I, for one, find that pulling these thoughts out of my head and putting them on digital paper gives me a little distance, a vantage point from which I can evaluate whether this or that specific worry is something I can do anything about. Putting aside things I can’t affect lets me devote what energy I have to issues that may be within my control. Am I worried about the effects of government staff purges on air traffic safety and nuclear security? Yes, I am, but that’s probably out of my direct reach at this time. Am I concerned about the potential elimination of Head Start and free school lunches for vulnerable kids? Dang right, but I can believe I can trust (and support) groups like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers to defend public education.

On the other hand, I’m also worried about the financial stress being caused by recent events. Many museums report that their income has been or may be damaged by the freezing of government grants or cancellation of contracts, loss of business or sponsorships as companies distance themselves from anything that might offend the current administration, or donors withdrawing their support. One dark imagining is that this loss of funding from multiple sources only gets worse over the next four years. And yet, I’ve heard directors beginning to share concrete, practical strategies for adapting to these disruptions to funding. For example, asking:

• Who are our core supporters? Might these individuals, foundations, and corporations be willing to increase their funding in order to sustain our mission and values, and the good work we do for our community?
• Who has leverage with companies or individuals that are staying quiet or backing out? Peer pressure can be a powerful voice, and our core supporters may be able to exert this influence at the dinner table, or on the golf course, to encourage their friends and colleagues to stand by us as well.
• Might sympathetic funders allow us to repurpose currently awarded funds to cover essential operating costs while we regroup?
• Long term, what funding streams are most insulated from the current chaos, and how might we grow these sources of support?

What’s Next

So that, right there, is something we can do: share our ideas, successes, setbacks with each other, create a playbook of knowledge about what does and might work. Reaffirm that we are none of us alone in facing the challenges of the coming years. Realize that if even if our institution has escaped harm, so far, all of us ultimately depend on the structures and norms that support the nonprofit sector. Museums are united in our dedication to preserving science, art, history, and nature, to passing on hard-won human knowledge, to helping our communities and leaving a better world for the next generations.

As a sector, we can act collectively as well.

• We can advocate for museums and the good we do for our country. One first step: sign up for AAM Advocacy Alerts to recent calls-to-action and stay up-to-date on opportunities to weigh in with your federal legislators.
• We can pool our data to make a compelling case for why nonprofits are an essential part of American society, and how museums serve as essential infrastructure for their communities. One first step: answer any surveys fielded by AAM and consider enrolling in the 2026 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers next fall.
• We can be there for each other, generous with our experience and advice, sharing our resources when we can. One first step: join one or more communities in AAM’s Museum Junction discussion forum, and use that platform to collaborate with your peers.

What we can’t afford to do is to close our eyes to what is happening, hoping this will pass on its own. There will be times when it is wise to decline a specific battle, to wait to see how things develop, to let others with greater resources take the lead. But, big picture, we all have a responsibility to protect not only ourselves, our organizations, and our communities, but the country that we will leave to future generations.

I’ll continue to reach out, listen to your concerns and your stories, and try to be a conduit for the collective wisdom that may help us through the coming years. Comment on this post, connect with me on Bluesky @elizabethmerritt.bsky.social, and join the Future of Museums Community on Museum Junction to DM me and discuss these issues with your peers.

Warmest regards from the future,

 

Elizabeth Merritt, VP Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums
American Alliance of Museums