Threat-landscape analysis of museum activism in the United States amid the 2025 federal assault on American cultural institutions, with structural recommendations for the MME.
The year 2025 marked the most aggressive federal assault on American cultural institutions in the post-war period. The Trump administration moved simultaneously against four funding pillars — the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Smithsonian Institution — while weaponizing executive orders to impose ideological content review on any institution that accepts federal dollars. The combined effect was not merely budgetary. It was an attempt to make the state the arbiter of legitimate cultural production.
The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget proposal called for the complete elimination of the NEA, NEH, and IMLS. This was not a new proposal — the same recommendation appeared in every Trump first-term budget — but the execution in 2025 was categorically different. Congress had blocked it each time during the first term, and in 2018 had reauthorized IMLS with bipartisan support. In 2025, executive action preceded the legislative debate.
DOGE placed approximately 80% of NEH staff on administrative leave in early spring 2025 and terminated over 1,400 open grants — many already in progress, with funds already partially disbursed. These were not prospective decisions about future funding; they were cancellations of money that had been lawfully awarded, contracts that had been signed, and work that had already been done. Institutions that had expended funds on federally committed projects were told they had seven days to appeal.
On March 14, 2025, a presidential executive order directed that IMLS be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The entire IMLS staff was placed on 90-day paid administrative leave. Staff were barred from the premises and stripped of email access. IMLS is the only federal agency dedicated specifically to funding both museums and libraries. It had received bipartisan congressional support for its entire fifty-year existence and represented 0.0046 percent of the federal budget. The American Alliance of Museums called the shuttering illegal. The Government Accountability Office subsequently ruled — in June 2025 — that withholding congressionally appropriated IMLS funds violated the Impoundment Control Act. A federal court in Rhode Island issued an injunction. By December 2025, following a November court ruling, IMLS reinstated all terminated grants. The fight is not over. Congress has not guaranteed future funding.
The NEA, beginning in May 2025, began terminating grants to organizations whose work did not conform to the administration’s stated priorities: “skilled trade jobs,” “AI competency,” “support for the military and veterans,” and “economic development of Asian American communities.” The Challenge America program — which had for decades provided entry-level funding to small organizations in underserved communities — was eliminated entirely. The NEA simultaneously required grant applicants to certify they would not use federal funds to “promote gender ideology.” The ACLU sued. In September 2025, a federal judge found the certification requirement unconstitutional. The NEA is now operating in a de facto suspended state — some cancelled grants have been reinstated through appeal, but the agency’s future appropriations are uncertain.
The Smithsonian received a dedicated executive order in March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which placed Vice President JD Vance — himself a Smithsonian Board of Regent — in charge of purging “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the institution’s museums and research centers. The order named the American Art Museum’s exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” as evidence of “divisive race-centered ideology.” By August 2025, the White House had issued a detailed compliance demand letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, requesting internal communications, gallery labels, and documentation on exhibition selection processes across eight museums. By December 2025, the administration was threatening to withhold the Smithsonian’s $1.09 billion annual federal appropriation unless compliance expanded. The Smithsonian’s response throughout this period was capitulation with delay, not resistance — a posture this report addresses directly in Section II.
Quantifying the damage to the field requires confronting that much of it is not yet quantifiable. What is documented: over 1,200 IMLS competitive grants cancelled, covering aquariums, art museums, botanical gardens, children’s museums, science centers, and zoos in all fifty states. The Japanese American National Museum alone stood to lose $1.7 million — roughly 12 percent of its operating budget — from combined NEH and IMLS terminations. The Museum of African American History in Boston received a termination letter. Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had all received IMLS funds in fiscal year 2024.
The chilling effect is real and is operating above and beyond the direct funding cuts. A CNN survey of more than a dozen major museum directors conducted in September 2025 found that most declined to comment. Those who did speak described a field-wide silence — institutions self-censoring exhibitions, avoiding press attention, and declining to take public positions for fear of becoming targets. The AAM reported that 63% of US museums receive some form of federal funding. The White House declined to specify whether “federally funded” meant institutions receiving the majority of their budget from the federal government, or any institution that had ever received a federal grant. The ambiguity is deliberate. Its function is to maximize institutional compliance through maximized institutional fear.
A further mechanism warrants documentation: cultural funding defunded from the NEH was redirected by the Trump administration toward the proposed National Garden of American Heroes — a sculpture garden Trump had first proposed in 2020. Cancelled humanities grants are thus not merely eliminated; they are being cannibalized for state-sponsored iconography.
The record of institutional response to the 2025 assault divides cleanly into three categories: active resistance, principled silence, and institutional capitulation. The distribution across these categories is neither encouraging nor surprising. Large institutions with the most to lose financially showed the most willingness to comply. Smaller institutions with explicitly constituted identities showed the most willingness to resist. The Smithsonian — the world’s largest museum complex and the administration’s primary target — occupies a singular and damning category of its own.
The Smithsonian is, by law, organizationally distinct from the executive branch. It was established by Congress in 1846 as a trust instrumentality — not a federal agency — and its board of regents includes representation from all three branches of government. When the Trump executive order arrived in March 2025, legal analysts immediately noted that the order’s direct authority over the institution was constitutionally questionable. The Smithsonian is not, and has never been, under executive authority.
The Smithsonian’s actual response: it shuttered its Office of Diversity within eight days of the executive order. It placed all employees on a return-to-office mandate in compliance with a separate order. It changed the title of its head diversity officer to “Director of the Office of Visitor Accessibility.” It removed DEI language from institutional web pages. When asked to provide internal communications and exhibition materials as part of the August 2025 compliance demand, Secretary Bunch assembled a team to compile the requested documents and stated publicly that the institution was “committed to being transparent and open.” By December 2025, the White House was threatening to withhold $1.09 billion in funding for incomplete compliance. The Smithsonian’s response to that threat was not to dispute the administration’s authority. It was to provide more documents, on a rolling basis.
The National Portrait Gallery director resigned following a White House call for her firing — a call directly connected to the content of her institution’s programming. The Smithsonian assembled a compliance team rather than a legal challenge team. The Organization of American Historians issued a statement declaring that “no president has the legitimate authority to impose such a review.” The Smithsonian declined to make that argument on its own behalf.
FINDING: The Smithsonian’s capitulation is not primarily a story about institutional cowardice. It is a story about structural dependency. An institution that draws two-thirds of its operating budget from a single government source has no effective posture of independence. Its public identity as an educational institution has not protected it. Its legal status as a non-governmental trust instrumentality has not protected it. Its prestige has not protected it. Only financial independence would protect it — and the Smithsonian does not have that.
Several institutions demonstrated that principled resistance is both possible and consequential.
Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Los Angeles. When the administration ordered federally affiliated institutions to remove DEI content from their websites, JANM board chairman Bill Fujioka told the Los Angeles Times directly: the museum would “scrub nothing.” President and CEO Ann Burroughs stated: “We’re not going to change our history. We’re not going to trade our values.” Fujioka later drew a direct line between the capitulation of other institutions and their financial incentives: “I am appalled by what happened with some of these major law firms, and other universities who capitulated very, very quickly. And that was all about money, and not the honor of their institution.” The museum stood to lose approximately $1.7 million — around 12 percent of its budget — and for that decision it faced immediate financial exposure. Private funders stepped in to meet the shortfall in the short term. The museum is a Smithsonian affiliate. The contrast with the Smithsonian’s own response is exact and intentional.
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit. President and CEO Neil Barclay told the New York Times that the museum would “resist and persevere.” Vedet Coleman-Robinson, president and CEO of the Association of African American Museums, stated of her membership: “I have not seen any indication we will slow down. DEI is part of our DNA.”
Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Director Jed Stulen used the administration’s assault on cultural institutions as evidence of cultural importance rather than as grounds for retreat, stating publicly: “The fact that an administration is going after museums and cultural organizations is only more proof that we matter.” SAM hosted the largest-ever US exhibition of dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s work during this period — a show explicitly organized around political power structures and resistance.
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York. Executive Director Alyssa Nitchun — leading the only major US museum dedicated to LGBTQ art — was among the most direct voices in the national conversation, citing “prime examples of disappointing museum leadership — museums that are deciding that being stealthy and risk-averse, and canceling shows or censoring artists, is the right tack.”
The legal and coalition response to the funding cuts produced documented, measurable victories. Twenty-one state attorneys general filed a joint lawsuit challenging IMLS terminations; a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the cuts in participating states. The ACLU filed suit against the NEA’s gender ideology certification requirement and prevailed — a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional in September 2025. The American Library Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Alliance of Museums all issued public statements; the AHA specifically challenged the administration’s legal authority over the Smithsonian. The Fall of Freedom collective — galleries, museums, libraries, comedy clubs, theaters, and concert halls — organized a coordinated day of resistance programming in November.
These victories are real and should be documented as such. They also have limits. Court injunctions require continued litigation to sustain. Reinstated grants are subject to future congressional appropriations decisions. The legal framework that protects cultural institutions from content review has been contested but not permanently settled.
The dominant institutional assumption in 2025 was that activism creates donor and audience risk. The available evidence does not support that assumption — particularly for institutions whose constituencies are the communities most directly targeted by the administration’s actions.
AAM 2025 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers. The American Alliance of Museums’ 2025 national survey of museum visitors found that the majority of US adults, across political affiliations, continue to support inclusive content in museums. The report’s summary language is unusually direct: the data indicates that “the biggest risk we face is losing our credibility with the public by not telling the truth.” The survey specifically addressed whether political pressure on DEI reflects a shift in public opinion. Its answer: no.
JANM and the private donor gap. The Japanese American National Museum’s decision to refuse compliance cost it approximately $1.7 million in anticipated federal funding. Private donors moved to fill the gap; philanthropist MacKenzie Scott made a $20 million donation to the institution — a response that went well beyond the shortfall and reflects a pattern the field’s data suggests: principled public positioning activates donor response in a way that institutional silence does not. This is not a general model — not every institution has a donor base capable of replacing federal funding, let alone exceeding it — but the JANM case documents the phenomenon at scale.
Generational donor shift. Research from Virginia Tech’s School of Performing Arts and the sector’s broader donor literature identifies a significant shift in giving patterns underway: Millennials and Gen Z prioritize mission alignment, transparency, and values-consistent organizational behavior over institutional prestige. The traditional donor base — Boomer-era giving concentrated in arts and cultural organizations — is aging out. Its replacement is a generation that researches institutional behavior before giving and is more likely to donate to organizations that have taken public stands. The institution that stays silent to protect its existing donor base may be making the correct short-term calculation while destroying the conditions for long-term donor pipeline development.
What the evidence does not yet show. There is currently no controlled study demonstrating a direct causal relationship between a museum taking a public political position and measurable increases or decreases in attendance or membership at scale. The available data is institutional, anecdotal, or cross-sectional. The absence of this data is not itself a finding; it reflects the relative novelty of sustained museum political positioning as a field-wide phenomenon. The AAM survey data on inclusive content and its relationship to institutional credibility is the closest current proxy.
The current moment did not emerge from a vacuum. Three distinct precedent lines are directly relevant to the MME’s strategic and positioning analysis.
The campaign by artist Nan Goldin and her organization P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) against the Sackler family’s philanthropic presence in major cultural institutions represents the most consequential example of sustained donor-targeted museum activism in the contemporary period.
Goldin, herself a survivor of OxyContin addiction, founded P.A.I.N. in 2017 following investigative reporting by Patrick Radden Keefe and others documenting the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis through their ownership of Purdue Pharma. The campaign’s tactics were direct action: die-ins at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Louvre — activists lying on gallery floors surrounded by empty prescription bottles — accompanied by demands that institutions refuse future Sackler donations and remove Sackler naming from their facilities.
The results: The Louvre removed the Sackler name from its Oriental Antiquities wing in July 2019 — within two weeks of a P.A.I.N. protest at the museum. The National Portrait Gallery (London), the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and the American Museum of Natural History pledged to refuse future Sackler donations. In December 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — perhaps the most prominent of all targets — removed the Sackler name from seven spaces, following a private letter signed by 77 artists including Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker. In 2022, the Victoria and Albert Museum removed Sackler naming from its most prominent spaces. The Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement, finalized in 2025 after Supreme Court intervention, bars the Sackler family from applying their name to institutions for nearly a decade — a legal recognition that the name had become a liability.
What the Sackler campaign demonstrates: targeted, sustained, artist-led direct action can change institutional behavior at the highest levels of the cultural sector. It took approximately five years from P.A.I.N.’s founding to the Met’s capitulation. The campaign succeeded not through legal means but through reputational economics — by making the cost of the Sackler name higher than the value of the Sackler donation. Goldin’s insight was that cultural institutions’ most vulnerable pressure point is not their finances. It is their relationship with living artists.
Beginning with the New Museum workers’s unionization campaign in January 2019 — widely credited as the catalyst for the current wave — museum workers across the United States have organized at a rate unprecedented in the sector’s history. By 2023, over thirty museums were at various stages of organizing. Key contracts ratified include: the Guggenheim Museum (97% vote, August 2023; minimum 9% wage increase, paid family leave, capped health insurance premiums); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (99% ratification, October 2022; 14% wage increase through 2025 following a three-week strike); the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (minimum wage increased from $9.00/hour to $16.00/hour in their 2023 contract, a 77.8% increase); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (one worker received $35,000 in backpay under new contract provisions).
The labor organizing wave has structural significance beyond compensation outcomes. It has destabilized the assumption that cultural prestige is a substitute for economic justice. The 2019 Art + Museum Salary Transparency campaign — in which workers anonymously shared salary data in an online spreadsheet — directly accelerated organizing by making pay disparities publicly visible. In a field where over half of workers earned less than $50,000 in 2023, and where the board members making compensation decisions are often among the nation’s wealthiest individuals, the spreadsheet exposed the moral arithmetic of museum governance with a precision no institutional report had managed.
The labor wave also documented an institutional failure mode the MME names directly in its founding documents: absorption. Museums had for decades relied on what organizers called “cultural cachet” as a mechanism for suppressing wage demands — the implicit argument that the privilege of working with art justifies below-market compensation. Unionization rejected the premise. Workers articulated, explicitly, that a legitimate institution does not exploit the emotional attachment of its workers to the institution’s mission as a mechanism of economic control. This is the same structural critique the MME makes of the nonprofit funding apparatus.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), enacted in 1990, required federally funded institutions to return Native American human remains, funerary objects, and items of cultural patrimony to their affiliated tribal communities. Thirty-five years later, only 48% of reported human remains have been returned. The legal mandate has not been honored. The posture of the overwhelming majority of US institutions toward Indigenous communities over this period has been one of bureaucratic delay, legal maneuver, and administrative non-compliance.
The 2024 NAGPRA regulatory updates — which closed the “culturally unidentifiable” loophole, eliminated the primary mechanism museums had used to avoid repatriation obligations, and mandated deference to Native American traditional knowledge — accelerated some action. The American Museum of Natural History announced the shuttering of Native exhibits pending collection review. The Peabody Museum at Harvard, following a formal institutional apology in January 2021, had returned 4,589 ancestors and over 11,000 funerary belongings to more than 250 tribal nations as of June 2024. These are not victories. They are the beginning of compliance with obligations that should have been discharged decades earlier.
The repatriation record also documents a consistent structural finding: public investigative journalism — specifically ProPublica’s multi-year NAGPRA reporting — drove compliance more effectively than the legal mandate alone. Institutions that had reported human remains without returning them for decades began moving after ProPublica published searchable databases showing exactly which institutions held what. Institutional behavior changed not when the law demanded it, but when the public could see it.
Between 2022 and 2024, climate activist groups — including Just Stop Oil, Letzte Generation, and Extinction Rebellion — executed a series of direct actions targeting art museums in the United Kingdom and Europe. Protesters glued themselves to frames, threw food at protected works, and staged coordinated disruptions at the Uffizi, the National Gallery (London), the Rijksmuseum, and others. In the United States, similar actions targeted institutions including the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
These actions require analysis because they represent the moment when museums became targets of activist disruption rather than partners in activist culture — and because the dominant institutional response was condemnation rather than engagement. Museum directors across the sector issued statements distancing their institutions from the disruptions while declining to address the underlying climate arguments. The strategic lesson is not that disruption is effective or desirable. It is that museums, by the 2020s, had become sufficiently visible as sites of cultural power that activists targeting public attention chose them as backdrops. The institution that has no political positioning is not therefore without political relevance. It is simply one whose political position is determined by others.
The structural constraints operating on US museums are well documented but frequently misunderstood. Three operate in combination to produce institutional conservatism even in institutions whose stated missions are progressive.
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit is absolutely prohibited from participating in political campaign activity for or against any candidate for public office. This prohibition is a bright-line rule; violating it risks revocation of tax-exempt status. The practical ceiling on electoral involvement is zero.
The prohibition on lobbying is more permissive. Some lobbying activity related to organizational mission is permissible; it cannot constitute a “substantial part” of the organization’s activities. Under the 501(h) election, an organization can calculate its permissible lobbying expenditure as a percentage of exempt-purpose expenditures — generally not exceeding 20% of the first $500,000 in exempt-purpose expenditures, with a ceiling of $1 million total. Organizations that do not file the 501(h) election are subject to a vaguer “facts and circumstances” test.
What 501(c)(3) organizations can legally do without restriction: issue advocacy (arguing for or against legislation, without naming candidates); educational programming on political topics; voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives if conducted in non-partisan manner; public forums and debates conducted in non-partisan manner; organizational statements on social, economic, or cultural policy questions; programming and exhibitions that address contested historical or political topics; refusal to accept specific donors or grants; and public statements opposing government actions directed at the institution itself.
The constraint is narrower than institutional behavior suggests. Most of the museums that declined to issue public statements in 2025 were not legally prohibited from doing so. They chose silence. The IRS prohibition on political campaign activity does not prohibit a museum from saying that cutting the NEA is harmful to communities it serves. It does not prohibit a museum from hosting an exhibition that argues a political position. It does not prohibit a museum director from criticizing an executive order by name. The legal constraint is regularly invoked to justify a posture of political neutrality that the law does not require.
Museum boards are composed disproportionately of major donors, corporate executives, and social elites whose economic interests are not consistently aligned with institutional mission. Board governance structures create institutional conservatism for the same reason they were designed to: they weight the views of the largest donors heavily in institutional decision-making. A board member who disagrees with an institution’s public positioning on a political question has an immediate and available remedy: withhold the annual gift. This leverage operates without any formal vote or governance action. The discipline it imposes is real and functions before any explicit conflict arises.
The board governance problem is the institutional expression of the dependency problem. Institutions whose funding is concentrated in a small number of major donors face the greatest exposure to this constraint. Institutions with diversified funding bases — earned revenue, broad membership, endowment income, multiple foundation supporters — have more structural freedom. This is not an accident. It is one of the primary arguments for the MME’s financial independence model.
Dependency is the mechanism of co-optation. This principle, foundational to the MME’s institutional design, is empirically documented in the 2025 museum sector record. Institutions that depend on federal appropriations for two-thirds of their operating budget comply with the conditions those appropriations impose. Institutions that depend on a small number of major donors adopt the political risk tolerance of those donors. The constraint does not require explicit threat or quid pro quo; it operates structurally, through the anticipation of consequences.
The Smithsonian is the definitive case: legally distinct from the executive branch, it nonetheless behaved as a subordinate agency when its funding was threatened. The legal independence meant nothing without financial independence to support it. The MME’s founding principle — financial independence as a feminist act — is not a rhetorical position. It is a structural design requirement for the kind of institution the MME is committed to being.