The Smithsonian Director Said She Wanted to Problematize the 250th Anniversary of America

July 10, 2026 Cat2, The Media
Zack Frank via shutterstock

The Washington Post spent years telling Americans that the Smithsonian was a national treasure beyond politics.

On July 4th, 2026 – America's 250th birthday – Trump's White House released a 162-page report proving the opposite.

Now the director who called the museum a "prime tool of social justice" is named on page after page of the most damaging institutional audit in Smithsonian history.

The Director Who Said Loving America Is "Very Complicated"

Anthea Hartig has run the National Museum of American History since 2019.

She told a University of California Riverside audience that the museum profession needs to figure out how to "problematize" America's 250th anniversary.

She said "loving America is very complicated."

She rewrote the museum's mission statement – stripping out references to "the infinite richness" of American history and replacing the goal of learning with "empowering people to create a just and compassionate future."

She said that change was specifically designed to help the museum "get out of the 'America First' mentality."

The Domestic Policy Council's report is direct: "These are not the words of an objective historian, but rather those of an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the Museum's founding purpose of fostering patriotism."

She collects more than $50 million a year from taxpayers to run this operation.

What Your $1 Billion Pays For

The Smithsonian takes in over $1 billion in federal funding every year – $1,080,500,000 in Fiscal Year 2026 alone.

Congress approved the National Museum of American History in 1955 with a specific mission: to "place before" visitors "a stimulating permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom."

Here is what Hartig built instead.

Walk through the museum today and you will find no major exhibit on the American founding – no George Washington, no Thomas Jefferson, no Continental Congress, no moments from the Revolution.

When the founders do appear, the museum leads with their moral failures and their role in slavery, not with the ideas that eventually ended it.

For Pride Month 2025, the museum hosted the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, D.C., book signings, and special object showcases from storage.

On America's 250th birthday – the single most important anniversary this institution was created to celebrate – they offered nothing specific for July 4th.

The DPC report also documented a monarch butterfly labeled "DACA wings" displayed with the phrases "#Here to Fight" and "Undocumented & UNAFRAID" – integrated into exhibits throughout the museum.

This Is Not an Accident

Institutional capture doesn't happen in a single moment you can point to and fight.

It happens through mission statement rewrites and new director hires and Pride Month programming replacing Fourth of July programming and butterfly exhibits labeled with illegal immigration slogans.

The DPC documents that Hartig's team didn't drift in this direction – they chose it explicitly, in their own words, and celebrated it publicly.

The museum also participated in the Smithsonian's "Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past" initiative, whose director told staff the goal was to take an "activist stance" and reinforce their "activism, their sense of equity, their sense of social justice."

You pay for all of it, and your grandkids walk through it and come out thinking the country that defeated the Nazis, split the atom, and put men on the moon was built on something to be ashamed of.

Trump's March 2025 executive order launched this review.

The result says plainly that under current leadership, this museum "cannot be trusted to tell America's story honestly."

Seven years.

One billion dollars a year.

And the museum dedicated to American history can't find room for George Washington.

Sources:

  • Steven Richards, "Trump panel finds Smithsonian American history museum ideologically captured, engages in 'activism,'" Just the News, July 6, 2026.
  • "Smithsonian's National Museum of American History promotes 'extreme political activism,' WH report alleges," Fox News, July 6, 2026.
  • "Smithsonian's Museum of American History Erases American Greatness, New Report Finds," The Daily Signal, July 5, 2026.
  • White House Domestic Policy Council, "Saving America's Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage," July 4, 2026.