Since its creation in 1965, the National Endowment for the Humanities has distributed more than $6.5 billion to support more than 70,000 projects, from landmark works like Ken Burns’s documentary “The Civil War” to small local efforts in every corner of the country.

But now, six months after the Trump administration canceled virtually all grants approved during the Biden administration, the nation’s largest public funder of the humanities appears to be transforming into a vehicle narrowly tailored to the president’s agenda.

Many of its nearly 50 grant programs have been paused or ended, according to an examination of its website. About two thirds of the staff has been laid off and, last month, most members of the scholarly council that must review a majority of grants were abruptly fired by the White House.

Still, the money has been flowing out the door.

The agency recently announced what it said were the two largest awards in its history, which together consume nearly 10 percent of its annual budget of $207 million. Both went to handpicked recipients.

One of them — $10.4 million to the conservative Jewish educational group Tikvah, for a project aimed at combating antisemitism — was awarded after the scholarly council voted against it, according to five people with direct knowledge of the discussion, who were granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

The council members said there were questions about the vagueness of the Tikvah application and concern that the project tipped into advocacy, which the agency is supposed to avoid. In a news release announcing the grant, the agency’s acting chair, Michael McDonald, hailed it as an “expansive effort” that would help counter “the sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses and streets,” which he said were “also attacks on the very foundations that have made the United States the exceptional nation that it is.”

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