# Executive Order 14253 Signed by President [[Donald Trump]] on March 27, 2025, EO 14253 ("Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History") is the policy engine of the 2025– Confederate-monument restoration wave. The order asserts that the past decade saw "a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite" American history, and directs the executive branch to reverse what it characterizes as ideologically distorted public history. ## What It Does The order has two main thrusts. First, it targets the **Smithsonian Institution**, directing the Vice President and Cabinet to work to defund museum exhibits and programs deemed to "divide Americans based on race" or to promote what the order calls improper ideology. Second — the provision most relevant to this knowledge base — it directs the **Department of the Interior** to determine whether any monuments, memorials, statues, or markers under its jurisdiction were "removed or changed" since January 1, 2020 "to perpetuate a false revision of history," and to reinstate any pre-existing monuments that were taken down. It instructs Interior to ensure remaining monuments do not contain content that "inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living." ## Implementation The National Park Service launched a review of interpretive materials across all 433 national parks, monuments, and historic sites, and posted signage inviting visitors to report content portraying "Americans past or living" negatively. The order is the cited authority behind the restoration of the [[Albert Pike Statue]] in Washington, D.C., and runs in parallel with the Defense Department's separate moves to return the [[Arlington Confederate Memorial]] and to reverse the [[Confederate-Named Military Bases]] renamings. Civil-rights organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, pledged to resist any reinstatement of Confederate monuments under the order. ## 2026 Escalation The Smithsonian half of the order — quieter in 2025 than the monuments provision — became the administration's principal public-history campaign in 2026. On July 4, 2026, the White House [[Domestic Policy Council]] released a report titled "Saving America's Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage," issued under the authority of this order. It attacked the National Museum of American History and, personally, its director Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, charging that the museum treats the American story "as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens," and recommending that a warning label be posted at every entrance. The Organization of American Historians rejected the report's claims and its demands. Congressional hearings followed within three weeks. On July 21, 2026, Hartig and Yale historian David Blight testified before the House Oversight Committee's Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee, appearing alongside two Smithsonian critics — Mike Gonzalez of the [[Heritage Foundation]] and Matthew Spalding of [[Hillsdale College]]. A second hearing before the Committee on House Administration followed on July 22. Reps. [[Nancy Mace]], [[Lauren Boebert]], and Eric Burlison used their question time to generate attack clips rather than testimony; Hartig's repeated answer was "I love this country unconditionally." On July 24, 2026, [[Donald Trump]] issued [[Executive Order 14416]], "Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution," directing the [[National Park Service]] to install temporary signage on the federally maintained sidewalks and walkways outside the museum "that corrects inaccurate information presented in the Museum." (Much of the contemporaneous coverage numbered this order 14415; the Federal Register numbers it 14416, and 14415 is an unrelated defense supply-chain order signed four days earlier.) The mechanism is the tell: the Smithsonian is governed by a Board of Regents and cannot be redirected by executive order, so the administration used the land it does control — the Park Service sidewalk — to stage a counter-narrative it could not legally install inside the building. That is the same instrument EO 14253 had already aimed at interpretive signage across the 433 units of the park system, now turned on a museum the order cannot reach directly. Rep. [[Joe Morelle]], the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, published a rebuttal that located the change in the President rather than the museums: Trump had praised the National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director Lonnie Bunch in February 2017, and, as Morelle wrote, "Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today." The rebuttal also documented the report's handling of evidence, noting that it had cut apart Hartig's sentence about the historian's obligation to "commemorate, problematize, remember, [and] celebrate" to make it read as an admission of ideological intent. Read backward from July 2026, EO 14253 is the opening move of this campaign, not a separate monuments policy that happened to mention museums. The order established the premise (that American public history had been deliberately falsified), the target (Smithsonian exhibits and federal interpretive material), and the enforcement route (Interior and the Park Service). The 2026 sequence — report, hearings, signage order — is that architecture being executed against a single museum, with the semiquincentennial ([[America 250]]) supplying both the deadline and the justification. ## Why It Matters Here EO 14253 is the document that turned a scattered set of conservative grievances about [[Confederate Monuments]] and [[The Lost Cause]] memory into coordinated federal policy. It supplies the legal-administrative rationale that every Interior-jurisdiction entry in the [[Contested Symbols Hub]] now runs through. ## See Also - [[Executive Order 14416]] — the July 2026 Smithsonian signage order this one authorized and set up - [[Smithsonian Institution]] — the target institution: its governance, funding, and why the executive branch must reach it indirectly - [[Contested Symbols Hub]] — the category this order reshaped - [[Confederate Monuments]] — the phenomenon-level catalog - [[Albert Pike Statue]] — the order's flagship reinstallation - [[Arlington Confederate Memorial]] · [[Confederate-Named Military Bases]] — the parallel DoD-side reversals