Edward Savage, The Washington Family, 1789-1796, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, public domain. “Rocket Row,” a grouping of famous missiles and rockets. Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, photo by Tim Evanson, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, CCA-SA 2.0 Generic license.
“Museums were never built for comfort. They are built for learning, understanding, and chronicling the truth of our past.” Congresswoman Alma Adams, North Carolina
Soon after his inauguration, President Trump defined his goals for American culture. On March 27, 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” outlining its cultural agenda for museums, historic sites, and federal arts institutions.
Presented as a corrective to what it called “ideologically driven” reinterpretations of U.S. history, the order argued that museums, especially the Smithsonian Institution and National Park Service sites, had adopted narratives emphasizing racism, inequality, and structural oppression in ways the administration claimed were divisive and demoralizing. It complained specifically about a Smithsonian exhibition that “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.”
The order directed Vice President Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian Board of Regents – together with the Office of Management and Budget and the administration’s congressional allies, to ensure that exhibitions and programming celebrate national achievement and “shared American values.”
Mail delivery coach, National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Cliff from Arlington, VA, CCA 2.0 Generic license.
The executive order also linked future federal appropriations to compliance with these interpretive priorities, while instructing the Department of the Interior to restore monuments or interpretive materials altered since 2020 to reflect what it characterized as a more “uplifting” historical narrative.
Academic and cultural leaders responded quickly. The American Historical Association argued that the order sought to “federalize historical interpretation.” Harvard historian Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed noted that the order “misrepresents rigorous historical scholarship as ideological simply because it acknowledges injustice.”
Leaders in the museum field raised similar alarms. The American Alliance of Museums said the executive order “invites political intervention into curatorial judgment,” and several current and former Smithsonian curators emphasized that scholarship on race, gender, and cultural identity reflects decades of peer-reviewed research, not partisan activism.
Non-on-dá-gon, a Chief, painted by George Catlin, 1830, Smithsonian American Art Museum, public domain.
In Congress, Representative Jamie Raskin called the directive “an effort to impose state-sponsored patriotism and silence academic history.” Senator Tammy Duckworth criticized the order for its explicit attempt to shape funding according to ideological compliance, noting that “public institutions should not be forced to choose between accuracy and their budgets.” Even some Republicans expressed unease: Senator Lisa Murkowski stated that museums “must interpret history in full, not as a highlight reel.”
Although framed by the administration as a restoration of “truth,” critics widely interpreted the order as an attempt to narrow public historical understanding, limit curatorial and scholarly independence, and replace academic consensus with patriotic-hued pap.
[The Smithsonian’s purpose is to] “help a nation understand itself—an impossible task without acknowledging the full history of slavery.” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III
The Administration pushed back harder. In August 2025, the White House sent a letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, demanding the removal or rewriting of exhibits deemed “divisive.” Within days, the administration released a list of exhibitions and artworks it found objectionable.
Earle Richardson, Employment of Negroes in Agriculture, 1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum, photo Smithsonian, CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.
President Trump followed this with a Truth Social post declaring the Smithsonian “OUT OF CONTROL,” accusing its museums of teaching “how horrible our Country is,” and directing his attorneys to apply the same pressure tactics previously used against universities. White House aide Lindsey Halligan, now leading the review of Smithsonian exhibitions, stated on Fox News that there had been “an overemphasis on slavery,” adding, “There should be more of an emphasis on how far we’ve come.”
The question of how far America has come – or perhaps regressed – resonates in many ways. In early October, a new Committee for the First Amendment made up of more than 550 artists, actors, writers, and media figures announced a revival of the coalition originally formed under that name during the post-WWII Red Scare to oppose the blacklisting of artists.
In the open letter released with the announcement, the group recalls that the original committee emerged “during the McCarthy Era, a dark time when the federal government repressed and persecuted American citizens for their political beliefs.”
The statement notes that elected officials, civil servants, scholars, and cultural workers were “blacklisted, harassed, silenced, and even imprisoned.” It emphasizes that the end of the McCarthy era came only when “Americans from across the political spectrum finally came together and stood up for the principles in the Constitution against the forces of repression.” The letter concluded with a call to collective action: “It is our turn to stand together in defense of our constitutional rights.”
Eliminating Support for Public Programs
Interactive Exhibit at Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington,DC, photo by Adam Jones, 3 May 2019, CCA-SA 2.0 Generic license.
Over the course of President Trump’s second term, the administration has moved steadily to reshape the cultural landscape of the United States by withdrawing federal support from arts institutions and pressuring cultural organizations to conform to its ideological priorities. What was once a largely bipartisan consensus around the civic value of public broadcasting, museums, and the humanities is being deliberately dismantled. Funding is clawed back midstream, advisory bodies are dismissed, and institutions are instructed to revise narratives and programming to align with the administration’s historical perspective. The result is a U.S. cultural sector operating under continuous political and financial strain.
Key to these developments is reduction – even elimination – of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
In 2025, congressional approval of the administration’s request to cut $1.1 billion from CPB triggered consequences in state after state. Public radio and television stations have cut staff and reduced operations. WPSU in Central Pennsylvania is on track to become the first public media station to shut down entirely. New Jersey’s state public television network has also warned of potential closure.
These outcomes follow the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s announcement of its own shutdown after nearly sixty years of distributing funds to NPR and PBS affiliates, leaving local broadcasters — particularly rural and community stations — without the resources necessary to continue programming, education services, and emergency broadcasts.
Headquarters of NEA and NEH, Washington, DC, photo by G. Edward Johnson, 5 April 2025, CCA 4.0 International license.
Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities (stripped of all but four members in October) have eliminated longstanding grant programs and rescinded already-awarded funding to museums. When the new NEA board introduced ideological compliance reviews linked to an executive order on “gender ideology,” a federal court ruled the requirement unconstitutional, showing how directly the administration’s cultural agenda has pressed against First Amendment boundaries.
Funding cuts have coincided with deliberate intervention in museum interpretation and curation. In August, the administration ordered the Smithsonian Institution to review and revise interpretive materials across eight of its museums.
The American Alliance of Museums issued warnings about mounting censorship pressures, while at the Kennedy Center an all new leadership openly supportive of the administration’s ideological bias was appointed. Brendan Carr, the newly appointed chair of the Federal Communication Commission, has promised to closely scrutinize programming on both public and private broadcasting and threatened punitive action for failing to fall in line with administration policy.
KTOO Radio and TV Public Broadcasting Service – Southeast Alaska, photo by Gillfoto, 3 November 2013, CCA-SA 4.0 International license.
Because of the comparable levels of publicity given these actions, the American public undoubtedly knows more about the temporary removal of comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night television show than about ongoing political censorship in museums, music, and theater – but the effects of direct attacks on constitutionally-protected freedom of expression in institutions across the U.S. may result in far more lasting damage.
The cumulative picture is one of cultural contraction, ideological oversight, and retaliatory funding policy. Institutions are not merely adjusting budgets — they are fighting to preserve their autonomy, their missions, and in some cases, their existence. Whether the growing number of legal challenges, congressional appeals, and grassroots advocacy will meaningfully alter this situation remains uncertain.
The administration insists that it is not “whitewashing” history, but rather “celebrating American success.” Critics counter that celebration without context is not history but mythmaking. The fight is not simply over museum labels. It is over what America remembers, what it forgets, and who decides.
