On July 21, Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, spent two hours before the House Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, at a hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past.” One member asked her whether she loves America. Her prepared answer was narrower and more institutional: “Our work is governed by the Smithsonian standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence, and nonpartisanship. The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates.”
The hearing is one move in a longer sequence. A March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” put the Smithsonian on notice; on July 4 of this year the White House released “Saving America’s Story,” a 162-page report accusing museum officials of “extreme political activism” and calling for changes to programming and leadership. Hartig is the first senior Smithsonian figure summoned to defend the institution in person. Her argument, compressed: presenting previously excluded experiences expands the national story rather than erasing it.
The Enola Gay script
There is a precedent, and everyone in the room knew it. In 1994 the National Air and Space Museum drafted an exhibition, “The Last Act,” that would have displayed the Enola Gay alongside artifacts from Hiroshima and a scholarly debate over casualty estimates and the decision to drop the bomb. Veterans’ organizations objected to the draft script; the Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning it as revisionist; the museum’s director, Martin Harwit, resigned in January 1995; and the exhibition that finally opened was the polished fuselage with minimal interpretation. The history was not corrected. It was removed.
That episode wrote the script both sides still perform: elected officials demand affirmation, historians insist on complication. It also taught museum administrators a quieter lesson — caution — that shaped curatorial choices for a generation. The difference now is scale. The Enola Gay fight concerned one exhibition in one building. The current confrontation concerns the institution’s authority as such: who decides what historical complexity is allowed to look like across twenty-one museums and the National Zoo.
A trust unlike the others
The Smithsonian’s vulnerability is structural. Founded in 1846 from James Smithson’s bequest “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” it is a trust instrumentality — neither an executive agency nor an arm of Congress — governed by a Board of Regents that includes the Chief Justice and the Vice President, and funded federally for roughly two-thirds of its budget. For 180 years that ambiguity protected it: no one clearly owned it, so no one could clearly command it. The same ambiguity now marks the pressure points, because the two levers that do exist — appropriations and appointments — sit with the people conducting the hearings.
What to watch: whether the report’s demands migrate into appropriations riders this fall, and whether the Regents treat “Saving America’s Story” as advisory or as binding. Museums survive criticism as a matter of routine. The question on the table is different — not whether the national story gets told, but who holds the pen at the editing stage.
