Congress restores funding to cultural institutions once on Trump’s chopping block

The Molina Family Latino Gallery of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino in Washington DC on 9 June 2022. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In a break with Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress approved a funding bill for multiple key government agencies and institutions in January. Some of those groups included the cultural institutions whose federal funds the president had sought to severely decrease or totally eliminate.

Last year, Trump issued “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, an executive order that specifically cited the Smithsonian Institution as having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology”. The executive order called for an overhaul of the museums and called out the American Women’s History Museum, which now exists only as an online exhibition, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).