Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, is calling for the firing of the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, throwing his weight behind a Trump executive order that directs warning signs be posted outside the taxpayer-funded institution over what the White House calls ideologically captured exhibits.
Gill appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” on July 22 to back the executive order and press for a broader housecleaning at the museum, telling viewers the American public is fed up with what they see inside one of the nation’s most visited cultural landmarks.
The order, which President Trump signed the previous Friday, directs the National Park Service to install signs along the federal walkways outside the museum. Those signs will notify visitors that the exhibits “should be renovated consistent with the findings” of a White House report and will point them “to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.” The order also calls for temporary exhibits or signage correcting what the administration considers inaccurate portrayals.
The executive action rests on a White House Domestic Policy Council report titled “Saving America’s Story,” released on July 4. The Washington Examiner reported that the 162-page document concluded the museum had replaced historical education with “extreme political activism.” The report accused museum leadership of viewing American history not as “a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated” but as “a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society.”
That language appears directly in the executive order itself, a pointed accusation lodged in formal presidential directive against an institution that draws millions of visitors a year to the National Mall.
The order also faults the museum for failing to properly commemorate America’s founding history during the nation’s 250th anniversary year, a charge that carries particular weight in a year when Americans might reasonably expect the country’s flagship history museum to center the story of the republic’s birth.
Gill did not mince words about what he wants to see happen next. He singled out National Museum of American History Director Anthea Hartig by name and called for her removal. His broader argument frames the dispute not as an academic disagreement but as a fight over whether federally funded institutions should promote patriotism or pursue ideological agendas.
Gill told Fox News:
“The American people are so sick of seeing the left take control of iconic American institutions. They want to see a museum that’s funded by taxpayers that is promoting patriotism, that promotes American ideals and values, and instead they get this kind of [woke nonsense].”
He went further, praising Trump for not looking the other way:
“This is the first time, I think, that we’ve had a president who takes this stuff seriously, who doesn’t just look the other way and allow the left to continue their long march through the institutions and continue shoving leftism down our throats and down the throats of our children.”
Gill also called for exhibits that present Americans as one people rather than sorting them into identity categories. “We need an actual objective telling of American history, not [looking] back on the American story and grouping different people into racial or ethnic groups or groups based on their gender or their sexuality or their immigration status,” he said. “We are one American people, and I think that’s what we need to see.”
The Texas congressman’s push fits a broader pattern of Trump using executive orders to reshape federal institutions and challenge entrenched bureaucratic cultures across government.
Hartig defended the museum during a committee hearing on July 21 at the Rayburn House Office Building, the day before Gill’s television appearance. She appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee and offered a starkly different account of what the museum does and why.
“The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates,” Hartig told lawmakers. “We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all its breadth so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions.”
She also pushed back on the charge that the museum seeks to tear down traditional narratives:
“When historians talk about reframing a traditional narrative, we do not mean erasing it. We mean adding the evidence, voices and objects that earlier tellings left out so that more Americans can see themselves in the national story. Examining the harder chapters of our history is not the same as hostility toward America.”
Hartig has also directly challenged the White House report. Breitbart reported that the museum director said, “As we continue to fact check the report, we unwaveringly attest that it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum.”
That defense raises an obvious question: if the museum’s work speaks for itself, why has its own parent institution conceded the point?
The fight over the National Museum of American History does not exist in isolation. It follows an earlier Trump executive order from March titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which Newsmax reported initiated reviews of federally supported cultural institutions. And it comes after a separate confrontation at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where director Kim Sajet resigned in June after Trump announced via Truth Social that he was firing her, calling her “highly partisan” and a “strong supporter of DEI.”
What makes that episode particularly telling is what came from inside the Smithsonian itself. National Review reported that Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch acknowledged in an internal email that “some of our work has not aligned with our institutional values of scholarship, even-handedness and nonpartisanship.” When the institution’s own top official concedes the mission has drifted, it becomes harder for defenders to dismiss outside criticism as mere political interference.
Sajet herself, in her resignation statement, said stepping aside was “the best way to serve the institution I hold so deeply in my heart.” The White House was blunt about the reasoning. Spokesperson Davis Ingle said: “On day one, President Trump made clear that there is no place for dangerous anti-American ideology in our government and institutions. In align with this objective, he ordered the termination of Kim Sajet.”
One of the more interesting wrinkles in this fight is structural. The Smithsonian operates independently of the executive branch. Trump cannot directly remove museum leadership or unilaterally alter exhibits. The New York Post noted that the administration used federal jurisdiction over the surrounding sidewalks, maintained by the National Park Service, as a workaround to place its warning signs on public property the president does control.
But the real leverage is financial. The Smithsonian receives roughly two-thirds of its approximately $1 billion annual budget through federal appropriations. That gives Congress and the White House significant influence over an institution that likes to present itself as independent. When taxpayers foot the majority of the bill, claims of institutional autonomy carry less weight, especially when the product those taxpayers are funding appears, by the institution’s own internal admission, to have strayed from nonpartisanship.
The administration has also made clear this is not a one-off dispute. Trump’s actions at the Smithsonian fit alongside his willingness to override institutional resistance across the federal government when he believes agencies have drifted from their core missions.
White House official Lindsey Halligan framed the principle plainly: “American taxpayers should not be funding institutions that undermine our country or promote one-sided, divisive political narratives.”
Several questions remain open. No timeline has been announced for when the warning signs will actually appear on the sidewalks outside the museum. It is unclear whether any formal action has been initiated to remove Hartig from her post, or whether Gill’s call for her firing reflects congressional pressure that has yet to translate into administrative steps.
The Smithsonian did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on the executive order. The specific exhibits or displays the White House report identifies as inaccurate have not been publicly itemized in detail beyond the broad charges in the 162-page document.
Those details matter. If the administration’s case is strong enough to survive public scrutiny exhibit by exhibit, the pressure on museum leadership will only grow. If the charges remain general, defenders will continue to frame the dispute as political overreach.
Meanwhile, the broader pattern of legal and institutional pushback against Trump executive orders suggests the Smithsonian fight may not stay confined to sidewalk signs for long.
At bottom, this is a dispute about who gets to shape how Americans understand their own country, and whether the people paying for that story have any say in how it gets told. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History sits on the National Mall, funded overwhelmingly by federal tax dollars, visited by families and schoolchildren from every state. It is not a private university seminar room. It is not a faculty lounge.
Gill’s argument is straightforward: if the museum has become a vehicle for a particular ideological viewpoint, the people funding it have every right to demand accountability. Hartig’s argument is that adding new perspectives is not the same as hostility toward the country. Both positions deserve a hearing.
But when the Smithsonian’s own secretary admits the institution wandered from its values of even-handedness, the burden of proof shifts. The question is no longer whether the museum drifted. It is whether anyone in charge intends to correct course, or whether it takes an executive order and a set of sidewalk signs to get the job done.
Taxpayers built that museum. They fund it every year. They deserve a history that belongs to all Americans, not one filtered through the priorities of whichever ideological faction captured the curatorial offices.
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