Today was pivotal moment for the Smithsonian Institution, as the deadline for sending the White House a wide range of requested internal communications and other materials relating to exhibitions and programming. Seeking to weed out so-called “woke” ideology, President Donald Trump has called for an unprecedented review of activities at the sprawling Smithsonian, with its 21 museums, 21 libraries, and 14 education and research centers, as well as the National Zoo.

In response, the head of the Smithsonian, secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, has turned over documents from “several galleries” and will provide more materials “on a rolling basis,” he informed staff in an email shared with the New York Times and Washington Post.

“As a public service institution, we are committed to being transparent and open,” he wrote. “As we have always done, the Smithsonian will continue to engage with the White House, Congress, and government stakeholders to provide relevant and appropriate materials about our mission, organization, exhibitions, programs, and public offerings.”

There are already signs that the Smithsonian is starting to comply with Trump’s demands to tell his preferred version of American history, which minimizes the negative effects of slavery, racism, and discrimination against other minority groups. Last week, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) replaced Trump’s portrait with a new photograph of the president—and changed the accompanying wall text, removing all mention of the two impeachment trials Trump endured during his first term.

How the Smithsonian proceeds is crucial, as 62 percent of its annual budget is federally funded. With the specter of another government shutdown set to begin at the end of the month, Congress is on the verge of passing a spending package for the current fiscal year that does not enact the significant cuts to the Smithsonian budget proposed by Trump. He had called for slashing the Smithsonian’s appropriations by $131.2 million, according to the Guardian.

But even if the Smithsonian’s budget survives unscathed, disbursement of those funds is controlled by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which means Trump could still withhold the money should he remain displeased with Smithsonian programming.

This portrait of Donald Trump just went on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Photo by Daniel Torok for the White House.

A Demand From the White House 

Trump has been working to bend the Smithsonian to his will since April 2025, with the issuance of an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

It announced the president’s plans to purge the Smithsonian of “improper ideology” accusing it of having “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”

Trump gave the task of enforcing the order to Vice President J.D. Vance, lawyer and presidential assistant Lindsey Halligan, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. (Trump has since appointed Halligan as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, a move a judge later declared unlawful.)

“The goal,” an anonymous senior Smithsonian employee told the Guardian, “is to reframe the entire culture of the United States from the foundation up.” At the Smithsonian, American exceptionalism is the only story Trump wants to tell—an approach supposedly rooted in being nonpartisan that could veer dangerously close to propaganda.

The White House launched its review of the Smithsonian in August, targeting eight museums: the National Museum of American History, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), National Museum of the American Indian, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the NPG, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The Smithsonian was to send over a wide range of materials from current and planned exhibitions, and “to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

But gathering such a comprehensive amount of information is a challenge—museum ethics expert Janet Marstine called it “just an impossible task,” speaking to CNN.

In December, with many documents still outstanding, the White House followed up with an open letter to Bunch, signed by domestic policy council Vince Haley and OMB director Russell Vought.

“We wish to be assured that none of the leadership of the Smithsonian museums is confused about the fact that the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world,” the letter warned. “The American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record.”

It added that “funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253.” That, of course, is the controversial “Restoring Truth and Sanity” order.

In his response to the ultimatum, Bunch wrote that “some aspects of the White House request are not readily available and will require a significant amount of time, labor, and coordination from various departments across the Smithsonian,” as reported by the New York Times.

The Smithsonian declined to comment on the looming deadline.

Parts of the American Latino exhibition of the National Museum are seen at the Molina Family Latino Gallery in Washington, D.C. ahead of its opening in June 2022. Photo: Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty Images.

A Budget Negotiation

The Smithsonian’s 2025 federal funding was $1.09 billion. The current spending bill, now before the Senate, after passing in the House last week on a vote of 397 to 28, would basically maintain that funding level, including $10 million each for the National Museum of the American Latino and American Women’s History Museum, approved by Congress in 2020. Both museums are still years away from opening.

“With the funding they receive each year, the two museums are hiring staff, planning, fundraising, beginning to collect artifacts, etc.,” Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St. Thomas said in an email. “Congress has not given us approval for sites on the National Mall, and with no location we cannot engage engineering firms, site surveyors, architects, etc. Therefore, no construction money is needed.”

But Trump had proposed scrapping the Latino museum entirely, instead representing the Latino community with a Smithsonian Latino Center that would have a presence across other Smithsonian sites. The museum’s first outpost, the Molina Family Latino Gallery at the National Museum of American History—which has attracted conservative ire—quietly closed over the summer, with a new salsa-themed show, “¡Puro Ritmo!” expected to open this spring.

Members of both parties have rallied to save the fledgling Latino museum. A letter from the Republican-led Congressional Hispanic Conference warned that canceling the project would “undermine the lasting contributions of the Latino community,” while a letter from the group’s Democratic counterpart called the plan “a setback not only for the Latino community, but for all Americans who benefit from a more complete and inclusive historical narrative.”

Building a dedicated Latino museum on the National Mall is a “generational project” museum director Jorge Zamanillo told the Los Angeles Times. “ We’re doing this for our kids and our grandkids, to make sure that they won’t have the same issues [with] feeling underrepresented,”

Trump’s budget also would have eliminated the Anacostia Community Museum, dedicated to Anacostia, a predominantly African American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and making it part of the NMAAHC. (In March, the Smithsonian placed NMAAHC director Kevin Young on indefinite leave; he officially resigned the next month.) The Anacostia received $3.1 million in funding last year.

But both institutions are about to be granted a reprieve. If signed into law, Congress’s spending package will make only a small reduction of $10 million, spent last year on a one-time construction project.

Congress will also have a say in the makeup of the Smithsonian’s 17-member board of regents. “Restoring Truth and Sanity” called on Vance to help appoint members “committed to advancing the policy of this order.” Six seats on the board are expected to open this year, with Congress and the president needing to approve all candidates, which are nominated by the board. But a bigger leadership change could be on the horizon.

“I don’t see how any of the reforms that the Trump administration wants to accomplish at the Smithsonian are possible as long as Lonnie Bunch remains at the helm of the institution,” Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the New York Times.

U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hand with Smithsonian Institution secretary Lonnie Bunch after during a ceremony in the East Room where a flag from D-Day was presented to the Smithsonian at the White House July 18, 2019 in Washington, D.C. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/ Getty Images.

Will the Smithsonian Comply?

In the wake of Trump’s initial executive order, the Smithsonian insisted it has authority over its own exhibitions. Bunch reiterated as much in a December letter to his staff shared with the Washington Post, writing that “as we all know, all content, programming, and curatorial decisions are made by the Smithsonian.”

But pressure from the president may be proving effective—and prompting the sort of anticipatory obedience described in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, which warned “do not obey in advance.”

When Trump signed an executive order prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion, which he declared “illegal and immoral,” across the federal institutions, the Smithsonian quickly shuttered its DEI office—even though the Smithsonian is technically a distinct entity separate from the government.

Other perceived signs of compliance are more subtle. Changes in wall text reported by the Guardian seem designed to avoid the ire of the White House: removing references to “social justice” in the description of art by a socialist, anti-racist artist; to colonial enslavement in a display of historic Dutch landscape paintings; and to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as being “unjust.” Just the word “diversity,” regardless of context, can be enough to cause hesitation—fearing it might be flagged by a search engine, an employee removed it from a text about astronomical objects.

And then there’s Trump’s portrait at the NPG. The National Museum of American History previously removed text referring to the president’s impeachments in July. The museum said the text was being revised, and later replaced it with a new sign removing lines stating that Trump “repeated ‘false statements’” that “foreseeably resulted in” violence.

The NPG has been something of a flashpoint in the battle over the Smithsonian. Trump attempted to fire director Kim Sajet in a social media post in May, and she ultimately resigned, even though the Smithsonian insisted that Trump did not have authority over staffing decisions. And Amy Sherald, the African American artist famed for her portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama, pulled her traveling exhibition from the NPG over censorship concerns surrounding a painting of Black trans woman posing like the Statue of Liberty.

Amy Sherald, Trans Forming Liberty (2024). Image courtesy the artist and Hauser and Wirth. © Amy Sherald. Photo: Kevin Bulluck.

The NPG insisted it was not planning to censor the artwork, only to contextualize it with an accompanying video of people discussing transgender issues that would have included anti-trans views. But the White House praised the show’s cancellation as progress in its fight to control the messaging at the Smithsonian.

“The Trans Forming Liberty painting, which sought to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols through a divisive and ideological lens, fundamentally strayed from the mission and spirit of our national museums,” Halligan told the New York Times.

The NPG still doesn’t have a new director, with Elliot Gruber, the Smithsonian’s undersecretary for museums and culture, serving in an interim capacity.

But when the museum put a new Trump photograph on view, the signage was notably different. Previously, Matt McClain’s dramatically lit shot of the president against a black background was accompanied by wall text noting that he had been “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, [and] he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials.”

 

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The new photo, by official White House photographer Daniel Torok, shows the president standing with his fists on his desk in the Oval Office. But where the other presidents have wall texts noting major events during their terms—including the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton—the new photograph is accompanied by a sign listing only Trump’s dates in office.

The museum is “exploring” the use of “tombstone labels” that eschew descriptive text and include only the artist, title, date, and medium of a work, NPG spokesperson Concetta Duncan told the Washington Post.

And the Smithsonian is now describing its own priorities differently. Ahead of each fiscal year, Bunch prepares a “budget justification” report for Congress requesting federal funding. For his last budget request under Biden, Bunch wrote an over three-page introduction that spoke of educating people about “the diversity of the world’s cultures [and] the sustainability of the planet,” and identified “research related to climate change” as a budget priority. He also praised the forthcoming women’s and Latino museums for helping “tell a more robust, expansive, inclusive version of the American story.”

In contrast, Bunch’s opening letter in the 2026 budget request is barely over one page in length. It focuses on the significance of the nation’s semiquincentennial, the need for “emphasizing digital strategies,” as well as upgrading and improving facilities with construction and renovation projects. There is no mention of climate change, inclusivity, or the women’s or Latino museums.

This story was updated to include details of the release of some Smithsonian documents to White House officials on January 14 at 9:10 a.m. ET.