As lawmakers clashed with a top Smithsonian official at a Tuesday hearing, they ping-ponged between small details — like items sold in the gift shop — and the loftiest American ideals.

Republicans accused Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, of trying to “rewrite” the country’s past with a version focused more on pain and complexity than triumph. 

The debate mirrored larger political messaging wars as President Donald Trump tries to influence cultural institutions. It comes after a White House report singled out the history museum earlier this month, accusing it of “ideological capture.” 

Hartig spent much of her time pushing back against the report and defending the museum’s work. 

“As we continue to fact-check the report, we unwaveringly attest that it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum. There is always room for improvement, but I also know the beauty and the inspiration and the expertise that lies in our collections,” she said. 

Congress had largely remained on the sidelines as Trump seeks to purge the Smithsonian of what he described in an executive order last year as “divisive, race-centered ideology.” After the White House’s Domestic Policy Council released its report, lawmakers are now tuning back in, with two different hearings this week alone. 

This one was held by the House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee, once chaired by former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and now led by Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. Otherwise known as DOGE, the subcommittee has been relatively quiet recently since its formation last year with the mission of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. But on Tuesday it played host to heated disputes about who counts as an American and whose stories matter. 

Republicans grilled Hartig on whether drag queen RuPaul deserved to be featured among content at the museum, as well as a past exhibit called “Girlhood (It’s complicated).”

“You sexualized the American history museum,” said Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C.

Others complained that slavery should not receive so much attention in the country’s founding story. 

“Your museum has minimized or contextualized the founders primarily through slavery and exclusion, while elevating narratives of conquest, systematic injustice and resistance,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said. 

A second Smithsonian hearing is scheduled for Wednesday at the House Administration Committee. 

The Smithsonian receives around two-thirds of its support from federal funding, and the rest from private funding and donations. Trump’s executive order last spring directed Vice President JD Vance and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to work with Congress to ensure that appropriations for the Smithsonian prohibit any spending on exhibits that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.” 

Although the president requested a 12 percent cut last cycle to the federal money it receives, Congress kept the funding level mostly steady for fiscal 2026 at just over $1 billion, without any policy riders driven by Trump’s vision. 

“The museum has strayed, I believe, from the original purpose for which it exists and receives federal taxpayer support. I feel like it’s become infected by a woke ideology,” Burchett said. “In the museum’s current telling, history is just an ongoing power struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.”

Democrats on the subcommittee pushed back, saying it wasn’t Hartig and museum curators who were rewriting history, but Trump. 

“Welcome to the Republicans’ white pride rally disguised as a congressional hearing. It might be uncomfortable for some people on this committee to hear about the true history of America, and I hate that for them. But facts are facts, and it’s a fact that there is a violent, exclusionary, discriminatory, sexist and racist part of American history,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., the subpanel’s ranking member, called it a “political witch hunt.”

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, another one of the hearing’s witnesses, said Smithsonian leadership was no longer up to the job. 

“You need to clean house and relieve all Smithsonian leadership of their duties,” he said.

But “cleaning house” wouldn’t fall to Congress or the president. Last year the Smithsonian Board of Regents issued a statement saying that “all personnel decisions are made by and subject to the direction of” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, “with oversight by the Board.” Six members of Congress sit on the board. 

Gonzalez also argued that two new museums — honoring women and Latinos — would “no doubt become two more incubators of anti-American grievances.” Those two museums have already been authorized by Congress but are waiting on lawmakers to pass a law clearing the way for construction on the National Mall. 

Democrats warned of a new era of McCarthyism and said Trump was no museum curator. 

“When politicians begin deciding what facts are acceptable, scholarship ceases to be scholarship; it becomes propaganda,” Stansbury said.