The White House is taking issue with progressive ideological bias in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) educational materials, in a 162-page report published July 4. 

The Domestic Policy Council’s report, entitled “Saving America’s Story,” focuses on “how ideological capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History erases our heritage.” According to its findings, NMAH attempts “to push museum visitors away from an ‘America First Mentality,’” wants to “turn American high schools into law clinics for illegal aliens,” and implement an “anti-racist toolkit” for their staff to “transform museums into anti-white institutions,” among other progressive initiatives. 

The council claims that this violates President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The EO called for Vice President J.D. Vance to collaborate with the Smithsonian Institution to remove radical ideology from its museums, education, and research centers. 

The report says that one of the ways NMAH has violated the order is by developing an Interpretive Plan, a framework for visitors’ museum experience that says, “We ask questions that speak to the core issues of our time, including race and identity [and] gender and sexuality.” It adds, “To do anything less is to shirk our commitment to relevance,” and “We will strive to reflect the boundary-crossing realities of life.” 

In addition, the NMAH also previously released a 200-page document titled “Museums as a Site for Social Action,” which reads “[Museum] sites cannot separate themselves from the collective memories that link their development with white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, destruction or absencing of alternative ways of interpreting and representing art and artifacts, structural racism and other oppressions.”

Furthermore, the NMAH has also hosted its National Youth Summit on topics such as “gender equality,” and the “teen resistance to systemic racism,” according to its website. 

“Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope,” reads the White House report. “Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

A spokesperson for the Smithsonian told ABC News, “For more than 180 years, the Smithsonian has served the American public with nonpartisan and independent scholarship, and we remain committed to doing so.” The spokesperson also said that the “institution remains committed to impartial learning.” 

Last year, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie G. Bunch III, said, “While the vast majority of our content is rooted in meticulous research and thoughtful analysis of history and facts, we recognize that, on occasion, some of our work has not aligned with our institutional values of scholarship, even-handedness and nonpartisanship,” in an email to staff, reported The New York Times. 

In response to the report, Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) posted on X, “The Left has used every institution it can, from schools to museums, to push its degenerate agenda on our children. Their goal is to normalize the abnormal.”