US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution.
The order instructs Vice-President JD Vance, who became a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents due to his position in government, to remove any “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the museums, centres, and the National Zoo in Washington.
The president stated that over the last ten years, there has been a “concerted and widespread” initiative to rewrite US history, substituting “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”.
No funding for programmes that “divide Americans”
The Smithsonian museums welcome between 15 to 30 million visitors annually without charge. The Institution manages 21 locations across Washington, Virginia, and New York, including the National Museum of American History, the National Portrait Gallery, the American Art Museum, and the National Zoo.
The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. It states that Congress should not fund Smithsonian exhibits and programmes that “divide Americans by race”. It explicitly mentions the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Women’s History Museum, which is currently in development.
Within the order, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum is also instructed to complete “restorations and improvements” to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, ahead of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and to restore federal properties, such as parks, memorials, and statues, which “have been improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history”.
Soon after taking office, Trump dismissed the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., appointing himself as chairman.
Earlier this year, Trump signed several orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programmes from the federal government. He also signed an executive order that would effectively dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
