Two former employees say the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., altered content on its website and canceled long-planned programming preemptively to avoid angering the Trump administration. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one ex-staffer told Politico that museum administrators appeared to be “trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change.”
The changes come amid a broader effort by President Donald Trump and his administration to control museums through executive orders, singling out institutions within the federally funded Smithsonian Institution, which he accuses of indulging in “anti-American ideology.” In a social media post last August, he said museums nationwide are “essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” USHMM is an independent museum with no connection to the Smithsonian.
A USHMM web page titled “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” was removed at some time after August 29, 2025, the last time it was saved on the Internet Archive, Politico reports. The page included lesson plans and resources drawing connections between legalized racism in the US and policies under the Nazi regime, along with links to information on the contributions of African American soldiers during the Second World War and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust.”
Also removed from the museum’s YouTube page—though still available to watch—is a 2018 video showing a conversation between a Holocaust survivor and the daughter of a man lynched in Alabama.
The museum had also planned a day-long workshop for college students under the title “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis,” but changed the name to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power.” An email obtained by Politico shows a senior staffer at USHMM’s Levine Institute of Holocaust Education explaining that the change was needed because of “concerns regarding how the term fragility may be perceived or interpreted in the current climate.” The museum ultimately canceled the workshop six months into Trump’s second term.
“The decisions here… from the name change to cutting the program, absolutely seem to be preemptive in order to save face and not cause any disturbances,” another former staffer said, adding that there was concern about “engaging in conversations that might take the participant out of the context of Europe, 1933 to 1945, and into present day.”
Trump last year purged several museum board members appointed by former President Joe Biden—a move Politico calls “unprecedented”—and replaced Stuart Eizenstat, a museum co-founder, with Republican lobbyist Jeffrey Miller.
The museum sent Politico an unsolicited statement while the publication was reporting the story, saying, “The Trump administration has not requested any changes to the Museum’s content or programming.” Asked to respond to the former employees’ statements, a spokesperson said “the allegations made by the two former employees that we have retreated from this content are false,” and that “neither the Trump administration nor others ordered changes to the Museum’s content or programming”—notably not the claim the former staffers actually made. The spokesperson did not address why the teaching materials were removed, instead offering links to active pages on the museum’s site covering topics including racism in Germany and the US and Americans and the Holocaust.
The museum told professors it had brought on to host the workshops that the events were cut due to funding challenges, according to emails reviewed by Politico, which notes the museum saw a $52.4 million increase in net assets that fiscal year.
