White House bid to cut funding could spell trouble for Smithsonian American Latino museum
Source: Roll Call
Posted June 4, 2025 at 5:56pm
Backers of a new museum honoring American Latinos are hoping it can withstand a budgetary strike from the White House, despite fears it could become a casualty in Donald Trump’s culture war. The president’s vision for the Smithsonian Institution includes slashing its federal funding by 12 percent overall and zeroing out money for the nascent Latino museum, according to budget documents released last week. Until now, the fate of the Latino museum had been traveling on a parallel track to a new museum of women’s history.
“It is important that not only as the women’s museum goes forward, so does the Latino museum. That was the intent,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., a co-sponsor of a recent bill that would clear the way for construction of the Latino museum on the National Mall. “That was the bipartisan agreement to move the museums forward together. But this administration, for whatever reason, has decided that only one of them should move forward.”
New York Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who has led the House bills to allow both museums to be built in the highly coveted mall zone, called the proposed cut “disappointing” and said she’d like to see funding continued. “But I’ve been so focused on the women’s museum. That’s been my priority. Maybe we need to do one museum at a time,” Malliotakis said Wednesday. The National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum were authorized as part of an appropriations package signed by President Donald Trump in 2020 and were to be built half with private donations and half with public funds.
While Trump publicly threw his weight behind the women’s museum effort earlier this year, he has made no such endorsement of the Latino museum. And he has taken aim at content across the Smithsonian, issuing an executive order aimed at rooting out “divisive, race-centered ideology” and attempting to fire the director of the National Portrait Gallery, claiming an authority it’s not clear he has.
Read more: https://rollcall.com/2025/06/04/white-house-bid-to-cut-funding-could-spell-trouble-for-smithsonian-american-latino-museum/