At least three petitions have been launched calling for Dr. Carla Hayden to be reinstated as the Librarian of Congress, following her abrupt dismissal last week by the Trump administration.
“We call on the administration, Congress and the Library of Congress leadership to: Immediately reinstate Dr. Carla Hayden as Librarian of Congress,” states one of the petitions, posted on www.change.org and signed by more than 9,300 people. “Dr. Hayden’s leadership is a national asset. Her removal is a national loss.”
“This troubling and unprecedented action should alarm every American who values [the] independence of our cultural institutions and recognizes the role libraries play in a democratic society,” warns a second petition, posted on EveryLibrary.org, and signed by more than 14,000 people.
Hayden’s dismissal represents “a disservice to the American people and a setback for the principles of intellectual curiosity, diversity and open discourse that the Library embodies,” states a third petition, on resistbot.
The petitions were started after a Trump administration representative notified Hayden on May 8 that she was being terminated effective immediately. Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers before that, has been appointed as the acting Librarian of Congress. The permanent post must be confirmed by the U. S. Senate.
Hayden, 72, was in the ninth year of a 10-year term as the Librarian of Congress. Appointed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, she was the first woman and the first African American to hold the position, and the first professional librarian to hold the post since 1974. Blanche, by contrast, has no experience working in libraries or archives.
From 1993 to 2016, Hayden was CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where she lives. She served as president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004.
“Dr. Hayden is a nationally-respected librarian, archivist, and scholar,” the change.org petition states. “Appointed in 2016 with bipartisan support, she has spent years modernizing the Library of Congress, expanding public access to its archives, and championing transparency, digitization, and inclusive programming. Her removal appears to be politically motivated and without cause – part of a growing pattern of the Trump administration targeting nonpartisan institutions and cultural leadership.”
Shortly before her dismissal, the American Accountability Foundation posted on X that “The current #LibrarianofCongress Carla Hayden is woke, anti-Trump and promotes trans-ing kids.” The group had earlier claimed that Hayden promoted access to books on “radical gender identity.”
At a briefing on May 9, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the reason for Hayden’s firing was that “we felt she did not fit the needs of the American people. There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the Library for children and we don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well.”
Hayden has since been defended by a wide range of groups and individuals, including the American Library Association; the Association of Research Libraries; Publisher’s Weekly; Congressional representatives from Maryland and other states; and three U. S. poet laureates.
