House Republicans are demanding answers from outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch about how a federally funded exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum came to focus on the U.S. military’s destruction of homes and neighborhoods, rather than on how home design shapes American life as originally proposed.

The letter, sent last week by the GOP-led House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, follows a June inspector general’s report on the 2024-25 Making Home – Smithsonian Design Triennial. That report concluded the Smithsonian did not fully implement Smithsonian Directive 603, the internal policy for flagging “potentially sensitive or controversial” content before an exhibition opens.

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From Just the News: 

The letter to outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Bunch, by the GOP-led House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, said that panel members are “concerned that the Smithsonian has cultivated a scholarly community that supports insinuations that the deliberate destruction of homes to intentionally cause human suffering is intertwined with the military doctrine of the United States.”

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” he wrote in a March 2025 executive order.

“The leadership of the Smithsonian and NMAH have altered the museum’s role from accurately and coherently telling America’s story to using the museum as a tool to advance personal, radical ideologies,” the letter reads.

The inspector general’s 32-page report found that Cooper Hewitt generally followed the Smithsonian’s content review process, but identified gaps. The committee responsible for reviewing sensitive content, it said, is not formally named or structured within Directive 603, lacks written procedures for how reviews should be conducted, and has no dedicated resources to support them.

According to the Oversight letter, the exhibit was first proposed to showcase 10 New York City buildings. It became, in the panel’s description, “a display of homes destroyed by American made munitions in various military engagements against ISIS and other terrorist organizations,” and it grew from one room to three floors.

President Trump moved on the Smithsonian weeks after taking office in January 2025. His March executive order singled out the National Historical Park in Philadelphia and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, and declared it administration policy to restore federal sites dedicated to history as “solemn and uplifting public monuments.” In July, the administration issued a 162-page report accusing the institution of “extreme political activism” and of presenting “a radical view of American history,” and Trump repeatedly threatened to fire Bunch.

Bunch led the Smithsonian for roughly seven years and resigned in early September, writing in his Sept. 8 letter that “I have fought for as long as I can.” Before his departure, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote to Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which oversees Smithsonian funding, warning that the administration was preparing a dozen signs for Smithsonian sites in Washington that would caution visitors about the institution generally and the National Museum of American History in particular, according to NPR.

The complaints are not new. A 2021-25 exhibit titled “The Electric Dr. Franklin” speculated that Benjamin Franklin may have shocked enslaved people in electrical experiments, a claim critics called unsupported by documentary evidence. Roughly 23 years earlier, author and culture commentator David Brooks argued in The Weekly Standard that the National Museum of American History “ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history,” citing thin treatment of the Constitutional Convention, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The Smithsonian did not respond publicly to the Oversight letter, and no statement from the institution on the subcommittee’s demands was included in the source material for this report.

A museum complex funded by American taxpayers spent years presenting the country’s military as a destroyer of homes, then defended the work as scholarship. The pattern is familiar: an institution staffed by people who distrust America produces exhibits that teach the young to distrust it too. Scripture is plain that a generation which forgets what God has done loses the ground on which freedom stands. Pray for the reformers now pressing these institutions, and pray that the stories told in our museums would be true ones.

Let’s pray for the leaders of the Smithsonian and every federally funded museum and archive, that they would handle the American record with honesty rather than ideology, and for the members of Congress and the administration now demanding accountability. “Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons” (Deuteronomy 4:9).

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(Excerpt from Just the News. Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley).