WASHINGTON – The jazzy sounds of a trumpet rang through the East Building of the National Gallery of Art on a recent Sunday as a small crowd of all ages gathered in front of the musicians and people as high as the third floor leaned over the railings, hoping to catch a glimpse.
The museum’s newest exhibit, titled “Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist,” which showcases the work of a Black female artist who sought to put justice at the center of her work, was opening with a boogie.
One of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums along the National Mall, the National Gallery of Art, is a popular tourist destination. But its future – and that of certain exhibits in museums across Washington – is in danger because of Trump administration executive orders and federal funding cuts.
A partisan spending bill, signed by President Donald Trump last week, allows him to seize control over the Smithsonian Institution and implement automatic spending cuts if the institution’s proposed spending plan for the 2025 fiscal year is deemed too expensive and contributing to the U.S. deficit.
According to a 2023 financial report, the Smithsonian received 53% of its revenue from federal government appropriations, totaling more than $1 billion. Most of the institution’s expenses – 51% – go towards employee salaries and benefits.
The Smithsonian Institution’s budget includes spending for its 21 museums, research centers, and libraries as well as the National Zoo, most of which are free of charge.
According to the new law, Trump could pull funding from the Smithsonian or attempt to change museum exhibits, overhauling arts and information institutions in a way unique to his administration.
When asked how they would be impacted by a funding cut, a spokesperson for the Smithsonian did not comment.
In January, it closed its diversity, equity and inclusion office following a Trump executive order calling for government agencies to “terminate” their “radical” and “wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion offices to focus on “making America great.”
“Our Institution is fully committed to excellence in our workforce, free from discrimination and harassment. We have closed our Office of Diversity but [are] retaining our efforts at visitor accessibility as it serves a critical function,” said a spokesperson for the Smithsonian Institution.
Despite the closure of their diversity equity and inclusion office, an Office of Equal Employment and Supplier Diversity remains and the museums have carried on with little change to their exhibits which celebrate diversity.
PEN America is a nonprofit organization aimed at protecting free speech in the U.S. In a report researched before Trump was reelected, authors Jonathan Friedman, Daniel Shank Cruz, Hanna Khosravi and Julie Trébault sought to understand how leadership at art museums approached censorship and self-censorship.
The report’s goal was to “uphold museums as spaces for open dialogue” while also managing the risks facing them.
“The future of the art museum field will stand to benefit from redoubling their commitment to such free expression values, particularly as they may be threatened by shifting political winds and new pressures to censor from numerous directions, in unprecedented ways,” the authors said.
The report said that “41.3% of museum leaders expressed strong concern about ‘Republican officials’ [censoring], while 3.3% expressed strong concern about ‘Democratic officials.’”
In the past, threats to the Smithsonian have come from Republicans who have sought to remove gender, sex and certain depictions of race from museums, libraries, and schools. Despite this, museums often see themselves as apolitical.
According to a 2021 survey paid for by the American Alliance of Museums, Americans trust museums as a source of information more than they trust the federal government or media outlets including radio and television.
Many of the survey respondents attributed museums’ neutrality to their trust in them.
The politicization of museums, however, has changed this. In 2020, President Trump criticized the Smithsonian in a speech at the White House History Conference.
He accused the institution of spreading Critical Race Theory, an academic concept that holds racial bias as an inherent part of Western society’s legal and social frameworks.
“Teaching this horrible doctrine [critical race theory] to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words,” Trump said. The Smithsonian did not respond directly to these comments.
Some Americans have taken to social media to say that the Smithsonian and other museums should get “DOGE’d” and called it a “scam.”
The host of “The Great Awokening,” a conservative Christian podcast aimed at deconstructing “wokeness,” Josh Daws, said that the Smithsonian plays an important role in how Americans understand U.S. history but criticized how that history is presented.
“A leftist agenda has no place in the institution charged with curating our national story,” he said in a post on X that got more than 120,000 views.
“This is how we turn a political victory into a cultural one,” Daws said. “It’s time we started celebrating America again.”
Calls for the Smithsonian Institution to be at least partially defunded are not new.
In an editorial published in the New York Post in 2023, Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, called for the defunding of, and the eventual closure of, specific Smithsonian museums citing their “anti-American bias.”
“[The Museum of the American Latino’s] aim is to teach the young and future generations to see themselves as victims of America, so they can destroy it from within,” he said. “It’s time for Congress to permanently defund the Latino Museum and put an end to efforts to use woke museums to further divide this country.”
Taylor Stoermer, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, is worried about what will happen if museums like the Museum of African American History and Culture go away. He called what is happening under the Trump administration in regards to its policies against diversity a “pseudohistory tsunami” saying that it leaves important history and information out.
“If [the] history [a person studies] doesn’t put white men, cisgender white men of European descent in the spotlight…then [they] are on the hit list,” Stoermer said in a post on Instagram. “What are we left with?” he asked.
The Trump administration has restructured organizations like the Kennedy Center, an organization for performing arts and home of the National Symphony Orchestra. Trump has named himself chairman, replacing past leadership, and is vowing to “fix” the Kennedy Center.
Nearly two months into the new administration, Smithsonian museums remained largely unchanged. In March, the Museum of African American History and Culture is celebrating The Activist as a part of this year’s theme of the “Year of the Black Woman.”
The Black Revolutionary Artist exhibit at the National Gallery of Art is scheduled to remain open until July 6.
