Top Ten Risk Management Exercises For Governing Boards of Libraries & Cultural Institutions During the 2025 Federal Shift; Western New York Library Resources Council, February 4, 2025

  Western New York Library Resources Council; Top Ten Risk Management Exercises For Governing Boards of Libraries & Cultural Institutions During the 2025 Federal Shift 

"Question:

Early 2025 has brought changes to stability of certain federal programs, funding, and governance. This instability is creating concern about access to grants, federal programs, and legal frameworks. What can our board do to address this?

Answer:

2025 has INDEED started off with a great deal of instability to federal programs, funding, and governance. In this answer, we’ll call this phenomenon the “2025 Federal Shift.”[1]

During such times as the 2025 Federal Shift, it is the role of a governing board to assess factors that could risk the achievement of an institution’s mission and develop plans to address them. This is a process called “enterprise risk management.”[2]

While confronting risk can be intimidating, it can also be empowering. And while not every risk can be avoided, it can often be mitigated.[3]

So, whether you’re on the board of a small public library or helping to lead a library within a large institution, now is a good time to inventory newly emerging risks and develop a response plan.

While the array of risks may seem infinite, below please find a chart of risks created by the 2025 Federal Shift. Following that is a chart of institution-specific risks.

Neither chart lists everything facing your institution, but these charts are provided to inspire the start of an orderly, meaningful, and impactful risk management strategy to assist governing boards in performing their fiduciary duties to their institutions.

Top Ten Risk Management Exercises

For Governing Boards of 

Libraries and Cultural Institutions

During the 2025 Federal Shift"

Feds: Pitt professor agrees to pay government more than $130K to resolve claims of research grant misdeeds; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 21, 2018

Sean D. Hamill and Jonathan D. Silver, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Feds: Pitt professor agrees to pay government more than $130K to resolve claims of research grant misdeeds

"A star researcher at the University of Pittsburgh has agreed to pay the U.S. government more than $130,000 to resolve allegations that he submitted false documents to the National Science Foundation to get more than $2.3 million in federal research grants, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh announced Wednesday.

As part of the settlement, psychology professor Christian D. Schunn, 48, will not be allowed to apply for or be involved with any federal grants through Oct. 15, 2019, according to a press release. He will have to withdraw from any applications pending for federal funding, the government said."