# Smithsonian Institution The **Smithsonian Institution** is the museum, research, and education complex Congress created on August 10, 1846 to execute the will of James Smithson, an English chemist who died in 1829 and left his estate to the United States to found in Washington "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." It is not a department, an agency, or a private nonprofit. The Congressional Research Service calls it a government "establishment" or a **trust instrumentality of the United States** — governmental, but organizationally separate from the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and overseen by a board drawn from all three. That anomalous constitutional position is the reason a 2025–26 presidential campaign against it had to be conducted from the outside in. ## Governance: why the president does not control it The Smithsonian is governed by a 17-member **Board of Regents**. Two members sit ex officio: the **Chief Justice of the United States**, traditionally elected Chancellor and presiding officer, and the **Vice President**. Three Senators, three Representatives, and nine citizen Regents fill out the board; citizen Regents are appointed by joint resolution of Congress to six-year terms, and serve alongside a chair, vice chair, and three-member executive committee. As of the Smithsonian's April 2026 fact sheet, John Roberts serves as Chancellor and JD Vance as the ex officio Vice President, with Franklin D. Raines as vice chair. The Regents — not the President — appoint the **Secretary**, the Institution's chief executive. Lonnie G. Bunch III, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, became the 14th Secretary in June 2019. No presidential appointment, removal, or reorganization authority runs to the Secretary or to any museum director. An executive order cannot redirect a Smithsonian exhibit, and the White House's own July 2026 report conceded the point when the only enforcement it could recommend was a warning label at the museum entrances. ## Funding and scale The Institution has two revenue streams. The first is the annual federal appropriation, carried in the Interior and Environment bill and reviewed by the [[House Appropriations Committee]]'s Interior subcommittee and its Senate counterpart; since FY2001 appropriations have run at roughly **66% of annual expenditures**, and the White House's 2026 fact sheet framed the stake as "over $1 billion" a year. The second is what the Smithsonian calls **trust funds** — gifts, bequests, grants, investment income, and commercial revenue through Smithsonian Enterprises — which pay for collections, programs, and the non-federal "trust employees" who work beside federal ones. Separate line items fund the National Gallery of Art, the [[Kennedy Center]], and the Wilson Center. The Secretary oversees 21 museums, the National Zoo, and a set of research and education centers. Two museums carry most of the political weight in this knowledge base: the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. ## The 2025–26 federal campaign [[Executive Order 14253]] (March 27, 2025) opened it, directing the Vice President and Cabinet to work to defund exhibits promoting what the order called "improper ideology." The campaign became the administration's principal public-history project in 2026: the [[Domestic Policy Council]]'s July 4 report "Saving America's Story" attacking the National Museum of American History and its director Anthea Hartig; House hearings on July 21 and 22; and [[Executive Order 14416]] (July 24), ordering [[National Park Service]] signage on the sidewalks outside the museum. The escalation narrative belongs to those two pages. What belongs here is the mechanism. Because the executive branch cannot reach inside the Institution, it reached the two things it does control: **the land and the money**. The museums sit on Park Service ground under [[Department of the Interior]] jurisdiction, which is where EO 14416 put its signs; and the appropriation is conditionable, which is what EO 14416's Section 2 instruction to use "funding or contract conditions" is for. The same design underwrites the [[America 250]] deadline — the semiquincentennial supplies the pretext for demanding corrections in 2026 specifically. [[Joe Morelle]], the ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, made the sharpest rebuttal available: in February 2017 Trump had publicly praised the National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Lonnie Bunch. "Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today," Morelle wrote; the President changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it. Oversight has not been strictly partisan. On August 6, 2026, [[Lisa Murkowski]] and [[Jeff Merkley]] — chair and ranking member of the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over both Interior and the Smithsonian — wrote to Interior Secretary [[Doug Burgum]] demanding the cost, funding source, sign count, authorship, and timeline for the EO 14416 signage, and asking whether any precedent existed for using Park Service land or funds "to communicate conflicting information or messages related to an outside entity's ongoing activities." ## See Also - [[Executive Order 14253]] — the enabling order; its 2026 Escalation section carries the report-hearings-signage sequence - [[Executive Order 14416]] — the July 2026 signage order and the jurisdictional workaround - [[Domestic Policy Council]] — author of "Saving America's Story" - [[Joe Morelle]] — the congressional rebuttal - [[America 250]] — the semiquincentennial clock the campaign runs on - [[NEA Culture Wars]] — the earlier template for federal pressure on cultural institutions - [[Contested Symbols Hub]] — the category this campaign runs through