# 1776 Commission The **President's Advisory 1776 Commission** was a temporary federal advisory body created by **Executive Order 13958** on Nov. 2, 2020, to promote "patriotic education" about the American founding. It was the first Trump administration's answer to the *New York Times*' 1619 Project. [[Larry Arnn]], president of [[Hillsdale College]], chaired it, with Carol Swain as co-chair, and Hillsdale also supplied its executive director, Matthew Spalding. ## The first commission (2020–21) Trump named 18 members on Dec. 18, 2020. They were conservative activists, politicians and intellectuals rather than historians, including [[Charlie Kirk]], [[Ben Carson]] and former Mississippi governor Phil Bryant. The commission produced one document, the **1776 Report**, released **Jan. 18, 2021**, two days before Trump left office. The report: - ran 41 pages with no citations, footnotes or named authors; - grouped "progressivism" and "identity politics" with "communism, slavery, and fascism" as challenges to America's principles; - called John C. Calhoun "the leading forerunner of identity politics"; - criticized parts of the civil-rights movement's later turn. The American Historical Association and 47 other scholarly societies condemned it as written "without any consultation with professional historians." AHA executive director James Grossman called it "a hack job" and "not a work of history." Critics also documented passages lifted from earlier writings without attribution. On Jan. 20, 2021, Biden revoked EO 13958 through Executive Order 13985. ## The revival (2025–) **Executive Order 14190**, "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling" (Jan. 29, 2025), declares the commission "hereby reestablished" and gives it a new job built around the **250th anniversary**. Section 4 says it will: - advise and promote the White House Task Force 250 and the Semiquincentennial Commission; - create a **"Presidential 1776 Award"** for students' knowledge of the founding; - coordinate biweekly 250th lectures; - advise agencies on "patriotic education" at national historic sites. It may have up to 20 presidentially appointed members and **terminates two years from the order, Jan. 29, 2027**, unless extended. Research for this page found **no public record of members being appointed** to the reconstituted commission, or of any report from it. The founding-narrative campaign of 2025–26 has run through other channels: [[Executive Order 14253]] on public history, the [[Smithsonian Institution]] review (Spalding testified against the Smithsonian at the July 21, 2026 House hearing), [[Freedom 250]] and the [[Classical Education Movement]]. Whether the commission itself did anything is an open question. The expiration date is the next thing to watch. ## Why it matters here It is the first-term version of the 2025–26 campaign over how American history is told: the same premise (that history teaching has been ideologically captured), the same institutional sponsor at Hillsdale, and in Spalding the same witness. It is also a pattern in its own right. The 1776 Report was published as the administration left office, and the revival was written into an order on K-12 schooling. Each time the commission did more as a symbol than as a working body. ## See Also - [[Hillsdale College]] · [[Larry Arnn]]: the institutional and personal center - [[Smithsonian Institution]] · [[Executive Order 14253]] · [[Freedom 250]]: the second-term continuation - [[Classical Education Movement]] · [[Americas Original Sin]] · [[Think Tank Ecosystem]] · [[New York Times Timeline]]