The Smithsonian Institution on Tuesday submitted documents to the Trump administration including digital photographs of labels, placards and other texts on display in its museums in response to a request from the White House, Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said in a staff email that was obtained by The Washington Post.
The White House, in a December letter, set Tuesday as the deadline for the institution to submit a trove of materials for the administration’s sweeping content review, which aims to rid the Smithsonian of what the White House has called “improper ideology.”
Bunch said in the email that the information covered materials “in several galleries” and that the Smithsonian would “continue to provide responsive information on a rolling basis” to the White House.
“As a public service institution, we are committed to being transparent and open,” the secretary said. “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.”
After months of relative quiet on the issue, the White House threatened in a Dec. 18 letter addressed to Bunch to withhold federal funds for the Smithsonian if it did not comply with a request to submit extensive documentation of its current and upcoming exhibits, wall labels, programming plans for America’s 250th birthday, and other aspects of its operations. “The American people will have no patience” for any museum that is “uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history,” wrote Domestic Policy Council director Vince Haley and White House budget director Russell Vought.
The Smithsonian on Tuesday confirmed Bunch’s email but declined to comment further. The White House did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
The December letter scolded the Smithsonian for failing to hand over comprehensive materials after an ask earlier in the year, asserting that its initial response “fell far short of what was requested.”
“Funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ and the fulfillment of the requests set forth in our Aug. 12, 2025 letter,” Haley and Vought wrote. The referenced letter specifically called out for a more aggressive review of eight Smithsonian museums.
In an email to staff in December, Bunch said the institution planned to send more information to the White House but stressed that “all content, programming, and curatorial decisions are made by the Smithsonian.” In a response to the White House obtained by The Post, Bunch asked the administration to “please understand that this work has been time consuming, involving many staff and departments throughout the Smithsonian.”
The Smithsonian’s federal budget is appropriated by Congress but disbursed by the Office of Management and Budget, which is controlled by the White House. Under Trump, OMB has previously withheld congressionally approved funds, The Post reported in August.
In his proposed budget last year, the president called for significant cuts to Smithsonian funding that would have slashed the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum and the long-planned Museum of the American Latino. The appropriations package that passed in the House last week and is moving through the Senate includes funding for those museums and would give the Smithsonian $1.08 billion — slightly more than the operational funding the museums received in fiscal 2024 and 2025.
Historically, the Smithsonian, which is a public-private trust of the U.S. government and overseen by its board of regents, has operated largely independently — but Trump has showed a new interest in influencing arts and culture during his second administration. The president over the past year has sought to reshape the capital’s landscape with a proposed triumphal arch and sculpture garden; has overhauled the Kennedy Center; and has repeatedly criticized the Smithsonian, beginning with his an executive order in March.
Last week, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery swapped out a portrait of the president and removed a wall text that mentioned Trump’s impeachments, replacing it a label that includes only basic information about the photograph. The Portrait Gallery, whose director resigned under pressure from Trump last year, said the museum was exploring alternative labeling but did not respond when asked whether the Trump administration had directed the changes.
In July, another mention of Trump’s impeachments was removed from the National Museum of American History.
While the White House has criticized the Smithsonian for “replacing objective facts with distorted narrative driven by ideology,” professionals in the museum world tend to regard the institution as restrained and mindful of appearing neutral in its presentation of materials.
“In the thousands of words that are on the Smithsonian walls you’ve picked out what, five things that bother you? That’s the best you can do?” David C. Ward, a former senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery, asked in an interview, responding to criticism of the institution from the right.
To Ward, the Smithsonian is far from the overly “woke” institution the right is making it out to be. He’s been in seminars where academics “insulted the Smithsonian as being the normcore, boring, uncool, reactionary museum,” he said. At times, “it was personally frustrating working there” because the institution played it so straight down the middle, he said, but “the element of political and academic neutrality is one of the strong points of the Smithsonian’s work.”
Each label adding context to a museum show undergoes a rigorous review process before it makes it to museum walls, he said, passing from say, a junior historian to a senior historian to a roundtable of curators to the director to editors. “It essentially goes through this kind of milling machine, which knocks the edges off any real possibility that some wild-eyed fanatic is going to write some wild-eyed, fanatic label,” Ward said. “It’s just not going to happen.”
Ward said he suspects that the Smithsonian is being scrutinized because it’s “an easy target,” as a federally supported museum complex in Washington. “They don’t have a lot of defenses.”
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