The Smithsonian Forgot The One Job It Had

On July 4, as the country marked its 250th birthday, the White House released a 162-page report from the Domestic Policy Council titled “Saving America’s Story.” The report, which follows President Trump’s March 2025 executive order directing Vice President JD Vance and the Office of Management and Budget to steer the Smithsonian away from what the order called improper ideology, focuses on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Its findings deserve a wider audience than a holiday news cycle will give them, because they document something more troubling than a few tendentious wall placards. They document a museum that has forgotten the one job it had.

Start with what that job is, because the museum’s founders were not shy about stating it. When Smithsonian leadership made its case to Congress in 1953, it argued that a main reason to build the museum was to place before the millions who visit the capital a permanent exposition commemorating our heritage of freedom. In 1955, Secretary Leon Carmichael testified that the museum would tell the story of American national progress and instill in each citizen a deepened faith in the country’s destiny as a champion of individual dignity and enterprise. Congress believed him and appropriated $36 million to build it. At the dedication in January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson expressed his hope that children would come to the building and see with their own eyes the ripe fruit of America’s historical harvest, Whitney’s cotton gin, Edison’s phonograph, Bell’s telephone, the victory of freedom, and the genius of the country. The mandate was never subtle. The museum exists to tell the American story in full, sins included, but with gratitude for the civilization, liberty, prosperity, and constitutional order Americans inherited.

Now consider what the report found. A visitor walking through the National Museum of American History during the semiquincentennial of the American Founding will find no exhibit dedicated to George Washington. None dedicated to Thomas Jefferson. None to the Second Continental Congress, the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or Washington crossing the Delaware. Read that again slowly. The flagship history museum of the United States entered the 250th anniversary of the Revolution without a single exhibit, new or existing, devoted to the Founders or the pivotal events of the Founding. The Declaration and Constitution appear selectively. The constructive role of Christian belief in shaping American liberty receives scant attention. According to the report, the museum scheduled no special programming for Independence Day itself in either 2025 or 2026, despite being open on both days.

Is this not simply an oversight, the kind of curatorial gap that afflicts any large institution? The report’s most damning contribution is to show that it is not. The omissions trace directly to stated intent. Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019, has described history as a prime tool of social justice and her role as connecting research and scholarship to activism and advocacy. She has said the museum works to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of US history. Most remarkably, she told her profession that it had to figure out how it was going to problematize the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Problematize is a term of art in critical theory. It means to surface alleged oppressions within a subject in order to deconstruct and discredit the prevailing narrative about it. The nation asked for a birthday. The curators planned an intervention.

The institutional evidence runs deeper than one director’s rhetoric. Under current leadership, the museum rewrote its mission statement, removing the phrase American history itself and replacing it with language about empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future. Hartig explained the change candidly: the goal was to get out of the America First mentality when telling history. Think about what that means in practice. The National Museum of American History deleted American history from its mission. If a bank removed the word deposits from its charter, depositors would be entitled to some alarm.

The museum’s Interpretive Plan converts that mission into marching orders. It directs staff, whatever the topic, to tie exhibits back to seven core issues of our time: race and identity, gender and sexuality, climate change, immigration, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism versus globalism. The complaint here is not that these subjects are off limits. A serious history museum should address race, immigration, and inequality, because a serious history of America must. The complaint is that every subject, whether democracy, entertainment, childhood, women’s labor, or sports, is now routed through the same ideological grid, one that treats American institutions chiefly as instruments of oppression and treats visitors as recruits. When Alexander Hamilton appears, he is an influential and flawed founding father who owned slaves, with no mention that he helped found the New York Manumission Society in 1785 or that its African Free Schools educated more than 1,400 students. When Benjamin Franklin appears in the Many Voices, One Nation exhibit, he appears once, not as a Founder but as a Philadelphian with allegedly ambivalent views of immigrants. The Pilgrims are framed as colonial oppressors and Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning. This is not history with the hard parts included. It is prosecution with the exculpatory evidence excluded.

Why should the federal government care what a museum’s curators believe? Because this is not a private gallery in Brooklyn spending donor money. The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality of the United States, overseen by a Board of Regents currently led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and populated by senior federal officials and congressional appointees. It received $1,080,500,000 in appropriations for Fiscal Year 2026, and federal money has covered roughly two thirds of its expenditures over the past two decades. Taxpayers are not being asked to tolerate a point of view they dislike in someone else’s institution. They are being compelled to finance, in their own institution, a systematic campaign against the story that institution was chartered and funded to tell. Congress bought a museum of American history. It is entitled to receive one.

Defenders of the museum, including the American Historical Association, argue that the White House is trying to sanitize history and that political pressure threatens institutional independence. But notice what this objection must assume to succeed. It must assume that the only alternative to grievance curation is whitewash, that a museum which centers the Founding must therefore hide slavery, and that honoring Washington requires forgetting the enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Nothing in the report demands any such thing. Its own framework insists the museum should document the failures of the nation alongside its achievements, should tell the story of 750,000 dead in the Civil War, and should explain how Americans came to reject Jim Crow by appealing to the colorblind promise of the founding documents themselves. Telling history honestly is not the same as teaching contempt, and a curriculum of contempt is precisley what the current museum delivers. As for independence, no one proposes that curators take orders on individual label copy; the proposal is that a publicly chartered, publicly governed, publicly funded trust be held to its charter, which is what boards of regents and congressional oversight exist to do, and the notion that an institution can take more than $1 billion a year from the public while remaining accountable to no one but its own staff is not independence, it is capture, and calling capture independence does not make it so.

For decades, complaints about institutional bias in museums, universities, and cultural agencies produced columns and conference panels and little else, a pattern scholars at the Heritage Foundation have long described as conservatives funding their own marginalization. The Smithsonian report models a different approach: read the documents, quote the leadership, follow the money, and then use the legitimate levers of governance, budgets, appointments, and oversight, to restore an institution to its purpose. The report does not order exhibits torn down. It establishes a factual record and invites the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, and Congress to act on it. That is not a culture war stunt. That is what stewardship of a public trust looks like.

The deeper stakes are generational. Parents bring children to the National Museum of American History for the reason President Johnson named at the dedication, so that the young can touch the inheritance and understand the meaning of the past. A child who leaves that building never having encountered Washington’s character, Jefferson’s pen, Franklin’s genius, or the improbable miracle of a republic conceived in liberty has been cheated of a birthright, and no amount of programming about the seven core issues of our time compensates for the theft. A nation that cannot explain to its children why it deserves their gratitude will eventually raise children who feel none. The prediction market currently gives strong odds that the Smithsonian fight becomes a defining cultural story of 2026, and it should, because memory is the ground on which every other political battle is fought.

The museum forgot the one job it had. On America’s 250th birthday, the country noticed. The task now is not to burn the institution down but to hand it back its charter, point to the words American history, and insist that it do the job the American people built it, funded it, and trusted it to do.

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