President Donald Trump escalated his battle with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Friday, ordering signage outside the institution to flag what an executive order calls “inaccurate information” presented in its exhibits.
The extraordinary directive comes amid intensifying Republican scrutiny of the Smithsonian branch, which was the subject of a recent 162-page report accusing its director, Anthea M. Hartig, of replacing “historical education” with “extreme political activism.” According to the order, the signage will tell visitors that the museum’s exhibits “should be renovated” to align with the report and direct them to locations where, in the administration’s view, American history is more accurately reflected. The administration did not specify which locations the signage would direct visitors to.
Trump’s order comes only days after Hartig faced two congressional hearings over alleged political bias in her museum’s curation and questions about her loyalty to the United States. Hartig, an explicit target of the White House report, rejected its central claims, defending the museum’s scholarship as “rigorous” and “fact-based” and saying it aims to tell a fuller story of America through “historical evidence, competing perspectives” and “enduring debates.”
The directive also ordered several high-ranking government officials, including the Secretary of the Interior and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to “restore trust in the Smithsonian Institution” and ensure its compliance with the White House’s findings. As first noted by the New York Times, the inclusion of the budget office appears to reference the Smithsonian’s reliance on federal funding. The directive also named the assistant to the president for domestic policy, whose Domestic Policy Council published the White House’s report on the Smithsonian.
Friday’s directive cited President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the Smithsonian of failing to properly celebrate “the remarkable achievements of the United States” by casting “its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” particularly ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary earlier this month.
Citing the museum’s failure to “appropriately honor” the “signers of the Declaration of Independence,” Trump has now directed government agencies to “install temporary exhibits or signage on N.P.S.-maintained sidewalks, walkways, and land used by the public” to correct what it calls “inaccurate information presented in the museum.”
Representative Melanie Stansbury (Democrat of New Mexico) objected to the order in a statement published by the Times, saying, “Once again, the Trump administration is attempting to use executive authority to exercise its political will over our nation’s independent cultural institutions.”
Stansbury also objected to the congressional proceedings this week, calling the Republican-led campaign against the Smithsonian a “political witch hunt” while announcing new legislation aimed at asserting congressional authority over the institution and similar independent agencies. She described Friday’s executive order as “a clear political overreach, driven by an ideological agenda to rewrite American history. Our Smithsonian institutions do not belong to the president, but to the American people, and neither does our national story.”
