Late last week, President Trump issued an executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. The EO accused the organization of promoting a “divisive, race-centered ideology” and aims to restore it as a “symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”
Here’s a closer look at the president’s order, what it could mean for the cultural institution, and why it’s put historians on high alert.
What does the executive order say about the Smithsonian?
In his executive order, Trump attacked the Smithsonian, calling the organization complicit in furthering a “revisionist movement” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” The broadside aligns with the Trump administration’s crusade against what it considers “woke” policies.
The order specifically mentions the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which posted an infographic on its website back in 2020 that listed “aspects and assumptions” about white culture like “rugged individualism” and hard work. The chart was removed after criticism from Trump and others and does not appear at the museum or on its site today. The order also singled out the American Women’s History Museum, specifically prohibiting the upcoming cultural center from recognizing any transgender women.
The order, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Vice President JD Vance to work with Congress to prohibit funding for exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”
It also calls for the restoration of any monuments or memorials removed or altered since 2020, when the reckoning against Confederate icons began.
How will the executive order impact the Smithsonian?
The Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846 with funds from James Smithson, a British scientist, per the New York Times. It now has 21 museums, libraries, and research centers, including the National Museum of Natural History and National Air and Space Museum, which last year drew nearly 17 million visitors.
It’s overseen by a 17-member board, which includes Vance, Chief Justice John Roberts, three senators and three members of the House, along with nine others from the private sector. The order directs Vance to work with Congress to appoint members committed to fulfilling Trump’s vision for the institution. Still, it’s not clear how much influence the administration can exert over the Smithsonian, and the organization has not commented on the EO.
However, as a public-private partnership, the Smithsonian does receive a significant amount of money from the federal government. About two-thirds of its $1 billion budget is appropriated by Congress, per the Times.
Some historians have expressed shock by the order. David Blight, the president of the Organization of American Historians and a professor of history and African American studies at Yale, told The Guardian it felt like “a frontal assault” against “historians, curators and on the Smithsonian.”
Many also made the point that it would be doing Americans a disservice to present a white-washed version of our country’s past: “It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that,” Chandra Manning, an American history professor at Georgetown, told the Washington Post.
Have politics affected the Smithsonian before?
Yes. In 1994, the institution planned an exhibit about the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II, but it was harshly criticized by veterans groups and some politicians who believed it was disrespectful to American troops and focused too much on the Japanese victims. As a result, the museum scrapped the exhibition and instead had a much smaller display of the B-29 bomber, the Times reports.
More recently, the National Museum of the American Latino has come under fire. In 2023, a group of Republican Latino members of Congress threatened to withhold funding from the museum, which isn’t planned to open for several years, because they thought its inaugural exhibition was “unbalanced” and depicted Latinos solely as victims of oppression. After a meeting with the museum’s director, in which he agreed to make a correction, they dropped their complaint.
