President Trump issued an executive order this week criticizing the Smithsonian Institution for peddling what he described as a “divisive, race-centered ideology,” and calling to restore it to “its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”
Here’s what to know about the Smithsonian, a sprawling network of federal museums that has been likened to America’s attic, and about the president’s order.
What is the Smithsonian Institution?
The Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846, with funds bequeathed by James Smithson, a British scientist, for the creation in Washington of “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
Today, it includes 21 museums, libraries, research centers and the National Zoo, many of them on the National Mall in Washington. They range from behemoths like the National Museum of Natural History and the National Air and Space Museum to small institutions like the Anacostia Community Museum, in the southeast part of the city.
All Smithsonian museum sites except for the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City are free. Last year, they collectively drew nearly 17 million visitors.
What has President Trump said about the Smithsonian?
In his executive order, Mr. Trump claimed that the Smithsonian had in recent years “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” and that it promotes “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
Mr. Trump directed that Vice President JD Vance work with Congress to prohibit expenditures on exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”
How much power does the president have over the Smithsonian?
The Smithsonian, whose headquarters are in a turreted red-sandstone building known as the Castle, operates independently, as a public-private partnership. Since 2019, it has been led by Lonnie G. Bunch III, a historian who was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.
The Smithsonian is overseen by a 17-member Board of Regents, a mixture of Republicans and Democrats, drawn from government, business, medicine and academia. While the vice president, along with the chief justice of the United States, is a member of the board by law, the executive branch does not have authority over the institution.
Six members of its board come from Congress: three senators and three members of the House of Representatives. Nine others are private citizens, nominated by the board and appointed to six-year terms by a joint congressional resolution, which the president then signs into law.
The president has no direct role in appointing regents. But in the executive order, Mr. Trump called for Mr. Vance to work with the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, both Republicans, “to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”
Who pays for the Smithsonian?
The Smithsonian’s annual budget of just over $1 billion is paid for with a mix of federal money, appropriated by Congress, and private fund-raising. Last September, the institution began a $2.5 billion fund-raising campaign, set to culminate with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July 2026.
The Smithsonian’s budget is set by Congress, not the executive branch. But Mr. Trump has recently sought to gut some programs funded by Congress, which has invited court challenges. He could also call for eliminating spending in future budgets, but Congress would have to approve that step for it to go into effect.
Have politics affected the Smithsonian before?
In 1994, the Smithsonian received strong criticism over a planned exhibition about the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Some veterans groups and members of Congress assailed it as disrespectful to veterans, by paying what they saw as too much attention to the Japanese victims and to the postwar arms race.
The museum revised the script, but the full exhibition, timed to the 50th anniversary of the bombing, was ultimately canceled. A simpler display, which included the fuselage of the Enola Gay with only a brief text with basic facts and a description of the plane’s restoration, went up later, stirring another round of protest from those who thought it erased the human impact.
Have there been more recent controversies?
In 2023, some Republican Latino members of Congress threatened to withhold funding for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino, a new museum still in the development phase. They cited concerns that an inaugural exhibition in a temporary gallery gave “an erroneous and unbalanced” image of Latinos, portraying them only as victims of oppression.
They later dropped their opposition after meeting with the museum’s director, Jorge Zamanillo, who agreed to make what he described as a “factual correction” in a label about a raft used by people fleeing Cuba that was on display.
New museums have sometimes moved from being controversial to being wildly popular. The decades-long effort to create an African American history museum was initially strongly resisted by some Republicans in Congress. But it ultimately won strong bipartisan support, including from Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, who sponsored its founding legislation.
Today, the museum is the third most visited in the Smithsonian network, with 1.6 million visitors in 2024, behind only the National Museum of Natural History (3.9 million) and the Air and Space Museum (1.9 million).
Will more museums be added to the Smithsonian?
Yes. In the pipeline are the Latino museum and the American Women’s History Museum, which were both authorized by Congress in 2020. Neither has been given a site yet, and there is still debate about whether either can be built directly on the National Mall in Washington, given a congressional ban on new construction in its core area.
The Latino museum, like the African American history museum before it, has a temporary gallery in the National Museum of American History, on the Mall. The women’s history museum has begun creating online exhibitions, including a recent one about women’s entrepreneurship and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which banned discrimination in lending. In his executive order, Mr. Trump called on the museum to make sure it does not “recognize men as women in any respect.”
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