The White House Revives a Pressure Tactic Against the Smithsonian The Trump administration is threatening $190 million in museum funding.

By Kelsey Ables Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud. He tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered the placement of warning signs outside its American-history museum, and demanded that the museum take down a modernist sculpture he dislikes. But while this political theater plays out publicly, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly using an obscure funding power as part of its campaign to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story.

To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”That executive order marked the beginning of the Trump administration’s campaign to change the Smithsonian, alleging that the institution had come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and prohibiting “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

The footnote does not specify how the Smithsonian should apply the order’s vague prohibition. But it is more than simply a threat: Apportionment footnotes are enforceable under the Antideficiency Act, the violation of which can carry criminal penalties. Such footnotes are one of several tactics that the Trump administration has used to try to supplant Congress’s spending power. In this case, the footnote suggests that the fight over the Smithsonian’s purpose goes much deeper than Trump’s most visible attacks.

Today, the Smithsonian is nearly two-thirds federally funded and receives an annual total appropriation of about $1 billion—a reality that would have agonized some of its earliest supporters. In a way, John Quincy Adams could be said to have foreseen what Trump is trying to do to the Smithsonian: In 1842, the former president, then serving in Congress, opposed a bill providing federal funds to the Smithsonian, writing that the new institution in Washington, D.C., should be “exclusively confined to itself and not entangled or commingled with any national establishment requiring appropriations of public money.”Even Joseph Henry, the first Smithsonian secretary, under whom the institution began receiving regular federal funding to support a museum, worried about it, writing in an 1877 letter that the museum was “liable to be brought under direct political influence.”If there is any constant in American life, Adams and Henry knew it then and Trump knows it now: Money is control.

Although the Trump administration has notched only small wins against the Smithsonian, it’s been playing money games since last year with an institution that is meant to operate independently. Starting in September of last year, OMB began adding footnotes demanding that the Smithsonian comply with two documents: the March executive order and an August letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch insisting that exhibition materials and other documents be turned over for a content review. Then, starting in April of this year, the footnote was revised to require the Smithsonian to follow Trump’s budget request rather than the 2026 appropriations bill Congress had passed—essentially telling the Smithsonian to operate at a $89 million deficit from what lawmakers had legislated. After several iterations, that footnote was ultimately removed on July 2. Two days later, the White House issued a scathing report on the National Museum of American History. At that point, the footnotes tactic seemed to have gone dormant. Until late last month.

It is unclear whether the footnotes have had any concrete impacts on the Smithsonian’s operations. The Smithsonian declined a request for an interview about the footnotes and the White House did not answer questions about the matter.

Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat who is the ranking member on the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Smithsonian, told me she spoke with Bunch this summer about the funding issues and got the sense that the institution was waiting to push back until the footnotes really interfered with its work. The footnotes were never challenged, she said. “I think they caused enormous heartburn for the Smithsonian. Eventually, the funds were released, and so now my worry has turned to what will happen on the next round.”Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who is also the minority leader on a subcommittee tasked with Smithsonian oversight, condemned what he described as the refusal to release tens of millions of dollars earlier this year. “OMB used small footnotes to make a huge, absurd assertion that holding funding to the President’s budget level—just a number on a piece of paper—overrode the actual law,” he wrote to me. “In fact, it is illegal to withhold such funding.”Multiple budget experts told me these footnotes are very strange. Cerin Lindgrensavage, a lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Protect Democracy, has been following apportionments closely and told me that the Smithsonian footnotes were so bespoke that a tracker that her organization had made did not flag them. “It never occurred to us that somebody would put something so egregious in text,” she said. In particular, “the idea that you would resurrect the president’s request that has zero force of law from an earlier part of the appropriations process and impose it at the very end is abhorrent to the rule of law and the constitutional order as we know it,” she said.

This context makes Trump’s 2027 budget request even more ominous for the Smithsonian, because it’s the lowest for the institution in years. At $961.3 million, Trump’s proposal cuts spending by about 11 percent from the previous year. The request also stresses the importance of maintaining and protecting museums on the National Mall, which is home to about half of the Smithsonian’s museums and ground zero for Trump’s pet projects in Washington.

Whatever the approach, history at the Smithsonian has been the responsibility of curators, not presidents. But the Smithsonian is in a particularly vulnerable period. Bunch will retire from his post at the end of the year. Citizen members keep dropping off the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents when their terms expire, and their seats are going unfilled, reportedly because the White House is trying to influence the new picks, s wrote this summer. Museum-director positions are open across the institution too—last week, the director of the National Museum of Natural History announced that he is stepping down—adding to a number of major vacancies. For a president seeking control, a power vacuum and a fraying institution could represent an opportunity.

One staffer who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record told me after Bunch’s retirement announcement that some employees worried that the president might attempt to appoint a secretary, just as he “fired” National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet in a Truth Social post last year. (The Smithsonian said Trump did not have the authority to do that, but she ultimately stepped down anyway). “I think you’d have to really stick your head in the sand to not feel some level of anxiety around this,” the staffer said. In a sense, the White House’s efforts have already worked simply by placing an entire museum system on edge.

It has a lot to lose. At the Smithsonian, private money goes toward the glossier endeavors, such as groundbreaking exhibitions and new facilities, while public money is typically used for basic needs, such as operations, conservation of national collections, and maintenance. Public funding keeps the doors open, which is why the institution’s unusual status as a private-public entity is most visible when it has to close during a government shutdown, as happened last year.

The footnote tactic exploits that vulnerability. Although the apportionment process was designed to help prevent entities receiving federal dollars from overspending, it is “not an invitation to the Office of Management and Budget to micromanage the federal government,” Lindgrensavage said. The Trump administration has tested the limits of its apportionment authority. More recently, the president has called for a sweeping cancellation of about $810 million in federal dollars, much of it coming out of resources for “refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens,” according to a White House memo.

Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, posted on X that OMB was trying “to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse.”Budgeting experts stressed to me that every line of a footnote is intentional and has a story behind it. In the Smithsonian’s case, the footnotes go into very specific detail. In the version of the footnote that OMB added this spring, the office proposed imposing travel restrictions on the Smithsonian, with exceptions for two projects that Trump is fond of: the semiquincentennial festivities and the Arabian leopards at the National Zoo (which are supported by a gift from Saudi Arabia).

In 1839, Adams wrote that he feared a Smithsonian bequest might be “squandered upon cormorants,” referring to voracious birds. Adams was prescient in his anxieties about the Smithsonian’s financial entanglements; he just had the wrong animal. Instead, the Smithsonian’s main antagonist is a devotee of big cats.