Vice President JD Vance has a new job: erasing what the White House considers “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian, a task that allows him to cast aside the progressive ideas he has decried since long before he was elected to public office.
The vice president, who sits on the museum network’s board, has been tasked with slashing funding for exhibits or programs that promote “ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy,” including those that recognize trans people, “degrade shared American values,” or “divide Americans based on race,” according to an executive order President Donald Trump signed behind closed doors on Thursday.
It’s part of a growing list of mandates for the vice president, whom Trump has assigned to help broker a TikTok deal and push controversial nominations through the Senate, and who acts more broadly as one of the America First movement’s top communicators and attack dogs. And although the Smithsonian project is comparatively small for Vance, it offers him the opportunity to make headway on his yearslong battle against progressive principles.
The Smithsonian Institution did not respond to a request for comment.
Vance has asserted for years that progressive ideologies, particularly those that posit that the U.S. was built on systemic racism, undercut Americans’ sense of national pride and contribute to stagnation and despair.
“It’s not about correcting systemic racism or systemic wrong, it’s about making us easier to control, it’s about making us ashamed of where we came from,” Vance said in a speech in September 2021, nearly two years before he was sworn into the Senate, about what he saw as an American “civilizational crisis.”
In Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir that launched Vance into the American imagination as a whisperer of the white working class, he wrote that a breakdown of patriotism in the U.S. was, for many people in his Appalachian and Rust Belt communities, like “losing something akin to a religion.”
“The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished,” Vance wrote.
In subsequent years, as Vance transformed from a never-Trumper to an America First crusader and Senate candidate, he increasingly blamed that disappearing patriotism on ideologies and frameworks such as Critical Race Theory that were constructed in liberal universities and had seeped into the national consciousness.
“So often, the systemic racism conversation is a distraction,” Vance said on Fox News in April 2021. In a speech in November of that same year, Vance slammed universities for teaching students “that this country, built by our fathers and grandfathers, is an evil and terrible place. Ladies and gentlemen, we are giving our children over to our enemies and it’s time we stop doing it.”
It’s a posture many Republicans have embraced — and in recent years, the Smithsonian has been a target of their ire. In 2023, as the GOP-controlled House squabbled over what lawmakers called “culture war” riders in the government’s spending bills, the House moved to slash funding for the Smithsonian’s planned National Museum of the American Latino after Republicans said a precursor exhibit portrayed Hispanics as “victims.”
In January, the Smithsonian — most of whose employees are federal workers and whose budget comes from federal appropriations — moved to close its diversity office and freeze federal hiring.
Republicans on Friday celebrated Trump’s order. “Who else wants the Smithsonian Institution to stop being woke?” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said on X.
“President Trump is restoring patriotism and pride in American history to our greatest public museums and protecting taxpayers from having their money wasted on divisive ideologies,” Vance’s press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk, said in a statement to POLITICO.
But Democrats cautioned that the move was an attempt to further control a powerful institution responsible for knowledge dissemination in the country. Trump’s administration has already flexed its power against universities nationwide, targeting some it says promote liberal ideology with crippling funding freezes.
“The Smithsonian has been preserving and sharing the American story for over 175 years, and I’ll continue to support the independence of this critical institution,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who sits with Vance on the Smithsonian’s board, said in a statement to POLITICO.
