Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III survived another meeting of the governing Board of Regents this week. The secretive conclave took place Monday, and according to a spokesperson who clearly didn’t want to talk: “They didn’t vote on anything.”
The next scheduled meeting is June 8, less than a month before the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence. That’s way too late to clean house at an institution that, under present leadership, clearly sees the milestone as more of an opportunity to expiate sins than celebrate virtues.
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“In 2026, the United States of America turns 250 years old,” soberly announces the website for the Institution’s semiquincentennial initiative, Our Shared Future: 250. “The Smithsonian will celebrate the nation’s successes, contemplate the consequences of our history, commemorate the sacrifices of those who have worked to uphold the nation’s ideals, and ask Americans to commit to advancing our democracy and preserving our shared future.”
The Smithsonian added dryly that it invites Americans to join it “for exhibitions, events, and public programs that invite us to reflect on the past, engage with the present, and imagine the future together.”
So, no, not exactly fireworks.
But that is par for the course for an institution that, under Bunch, sees its mission more as shaming Americans over past sins the U.S. shares with the rest of the planet, especially slavery, than making them proud of the nation’s unique achievements, such as ahistorical levels of liberty and prosperity.
Slavery, Bunch told PBS in 2020, is “embedded in everything” in American history and is “in our lives all the day, every day.”
“Museums and other cultural institutions are indispensable tools in confronting difficult truths and breaking down invented pasts,” Bunch wrote in the Washington Post in 2019, the year he became Smithsonian chief honcho. “We must let go of the myths.”
After the 2016 election, he wrote in his book A Fool’s Errand that, in the age of Trump, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is his creation, had become “a symbol of resistance, a beacon of hope on the National Mall, a site that championed a more progressive America” to some people. Others still, he added, “found the museum to be a refuge” against Trump.
The black community, he added, “could find sustenance and guidance as to how to combat the hatred that was suddenly omnipresent” under Trump.
And Bunch is just one of many in leadership at the Smithsonian who espouse views such as these.
So how do you get rid of these people? Not just in time for the celebration of the semiquincentennial, but for the Smithsonian’s 21 museums to resume their mission as national museums — to preserve and curate a nation’s heritage and transmit it to future generations accurately?
There are probably many ways. The Office of Management and Budget has already announced that the more than $1 billion that the Smithsonian gets a year from the taxpayer, close to two-thirds of its budget, must align with the president’s agenda as he set it in March 2025 in Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
The executive order tells the Smithsonian to stop distorting history. Since it hasn’t done that, the OMB, run by the very creative Russ Vought, can tighten the purse strings.
But controlling the Board of Regents, which can remove Bunch and the rest, is probably an easier way. And no, we don’t have to wait till June 8.
The board usually has 17 members: Chief Justice John Roberts, Vice President JD Vance, six members of Congress divided evenly between the two chambers, and nine “citizen Regents” voted in by joint resolution of Congress, who can serve six-year terms that are renewable once. But three of the citizen regents have termed out.
The New York Times’s Robin Pogrebin reported earlier this month that the board had agreed on the replacements for two of them, and the minutes from the Oct. 27 meeting reflect that the board also agreed to renominate the third. The six members of Congress were supposed to forward these names to their colleagues for votes, but Pogrebin reports that that hasn’t happened.
What did happen? Was there a deadlock among the six? We don’t know, because the board has refused to post minutes for any meeting this year. But the executive order calls on Vance to work with Congress “to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”
If we are now down to a 14-member board, the way to do that is simple. Provided that Roberts votes with Vance and the three Republicans to oust Bunch and others, the administration would have to find three citizen trustees for an 8-6 removal vote. Trump appointed two of them and a third one, Barbara Barrett, though appointed by former President Barack Obama, the 25th secretary of the Air Force, is a Republican.
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According to the bylaws of the board, emergency meetings can happen “when requested by the Executive Committee, any six Regents, the Chancellor, the Chair of the Board, or the Secretary,” provided 72-hour notice. The bylaws also state that the secretary “shall be removable by the Board of Regents whenever, in their judgment, the interests of the institution require such removal.”
This time has come.
