Trump vows to expand his review of U.S. museums. Can he do that?  : NPR

On his Truth Social platform Tuesday, President Trump called the Smithsonian Institution and other museums “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.'” He added, “I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities.”

The White House started an audit of the Smithsonian earlier this month. But what about other institutions? It is unclear what legal and financial pressures his administration might pursue in trying to align American museums to his vision.

The president’s post on Truth Social was not clear: was he referring just to the Smithsonian museums, or to American museums more broadly?

NPR asked the White House to clarify this issue. A White House official, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the specifics of the plan, responded in a statement: “President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable. He will start with the Smithsonian and then go from there.”

The administration’s review could include many institutions: the membership of the American Alliance of Museums includes around 22,000 institutions across the country — everything from the giant, internationally-known art museums, to historic houses, natural history museums, local historical societies and botanical gardens. Many address history, identity, the environment and other subjects that are politically polarized.

It is unclear what the timeline may be for these reviews, what the metrics might be for success and who would be doing the reviewing.

In a statement to NPR Wednesday, the president and CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, Marilyn Jackson, framed the issue as one of creative and scholarly independence. She wrote:

“The idea of extending federal reviews to the nation’s 22,000 museums misunderstands how museums operate. The vast majority are independent nonprofits, guided by professional standards and community trust. Museums cannot and should not be subject to government review of their exhibitions. The integrity of museums depends on their independence, and that’s what makes them so valuable to the public.”

Does the White House have any specific museums in mind for review? 

In Tuesday’s post, Trump seemed to specifically target representations of Black American history and experience, writing: “Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.” Indeed, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is one of the eight Smithsonian museums pinpointed for immediate review — along with others like the Air and Space Museum.

Trump Administration critics, including multiple Democratic Congressional representatives, like Rep. Bennie Thompson, have said this year that the President is trying to erase “Black voices and history.” The New York City Bar released a statement in June saying that it seemed like the president and his administration are trying to dismantle the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“The common thread running through all these orders and actions is that the civil rights laws can and should be invoked to justify protecting a dominant group (i.e., white people or cisgender girls) at the expense of the rights of minority groups and in contravention of the transformative purpose of these laws,” the NYC Bar statement read.

Why was the Smithsonian the first focus of the administration’s attention?

The Smithsonian is a unique case: it was founded by Congress and receives 62% of its funding from federal sources. It also figures prominently in the nation’s imagination and is a major tourist draw in Washington, D.C.; there were 16.8 million visits to Smithsonian-affiliated institutions last year.

NPR has reached out for comment from the Smithsonian Institution, but did not receive a reply.

How much federal funding do other, non-Smithsonian museums receive?

According to data collected and analyzed by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), 63% of organizations receive some kind of federal funding; about 36% receive direct federal aid.

However, those numbers don’t take into account this spring’s gutting of the Institute of Museum and Library Services or the slashing of budgets at the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, so we just don’t know yet what current figures look like. (A federal judge recently ruled that the elimination of NEH grants was unlawful.)

The AAM told NPR on Wednesday that it has just closed a new survey of its membership about the impact of such cuts, but the new data are not yet available.

What about funding at lower levels of government?

As of its last survey, the AAM says that about 20% of United States museums are operated by some level of government: 2% by the federal government; 10% by the states; 2% by counties; 6% by municipalities; 2% by counties; and 0.3% by tribal governments.

Experts in the museum world say they are concerned that government officials on the state or local level may try to align their institutions with Trump’s vision, by using the financial leverage they have. For example, many local museums sit on government-owned land that they either occupy for free or rent for a nominal fee.

Museum leaders are also privately expressing concerns that major donors — whether corporate sponsors or individual philanthropists — may press museum executives and curators to reframe their exhibitions to fit political narratives that comply with those coming from the White House.

In Tuesday’s post, Trump wrote that he intends to review museums in a similar way to the White House’s audit of universities and colleges. Is that possible?

The Trump administration has argued that universities like Harvard, Columbia and Brown violated federal civil rights law by failing to protect their communities from alleged antisemitism. It is unclear what legal argument the White House might make against museums.

In an interview, Patty Gerstenblith, professor of law and director of the Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law at DePaul College of Law in Chicago, emphasized that museums have a First Amendment right of expression that is clearly established by case law, and that artistic expression is also protected free speech.

“I don’t believe that the government could directly prohibit what the museum presents to the American public — it would be a violation of the First Amendment,” she said.

However, she said, freedom of expression does not necessarily mean that the federal government is required to pay for that expression.

Gerstenblith also said that funding and free speech issues are complex.

“Speech can be regulated,” Gerstenblith said, “but it can’t be regulated on the basis of what’s called viewpoint discrimination. So for example, a funding agency could say, ‘We’re not going to give any money to any special exhibit,’ and that would be fine. But if they said, ‘We will not give funding to a special exhibit that has a particular viewpoint,’ then I think that would violate the First Amendment.”

But there is another element at play, Gerstenblith said.

“Is this speech government speech, or is it private speech? Because the government can regulate its own speech however it wants, including viewpoint discrimination. So to the extent it’s government speech, nobody can do anything about it. Some would argue that [by] funding . . . a specific exhibit [it] becomes government speech.”

What has the Supreme Court said about arts funding?

The Supreme Court weighed in with a landmark case in 1998, in a very different political era. National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley addressed whether the government could regulate art if they funded it, after Congress passed a law saying that appropriated funding was dependent on meeting a decency standard.

In that case, four artists — Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller — sued the NEA, claiming that the agency had violated their freedom of speech rights. The Supreme Court upheld the “decency” requirement.

What are scholars and other experts saying?

On Aug. 15, after the White House announced the Smithsonian review, the American Alliance of Museums addressed what it called “growing threats of censorship,” adding: “This is not just a concern for select institutions. These pressures can create a chilling effect across the entire museum sector. Freedom of thought and expression are foundational American values, and museums uphold them by creating spaces where people can engage with history, science, art and culture in ways that are honest, fact-based and thought-provoking.”

Other professional organizations are also pushing back, including the Organizaition of American HIstorians (OAH), which called the proposed oversight an attempt “to weaponize our shared past to serve political imperatives of the present and an imagined future,” and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), which called the government’s confrontation with the Smithsonian “an affront to our country’s cultural crown jewel, to history practitioners everywhere, and to the American people.”

President Trump is now the chair of the Kennedy Center, which is also in Washington, D.C. Is there any direct relationship between what’s happening there and at the Smithsonian?

They both seem to be signs that the president is quite invested in his second term in shaping how Americans experience culture and the country’s history, especially how it is expressed in the nation’s capital. But there’s no direct link or relationship.

Additional reporting by Neda Ulaby. Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and digital.