The Smithsonian’s Dwindling Attendance

On America’s July 4 semi-quincentennial, the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) published a report arguing that the Smithsonian Institution has “adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance.” More bluntly, the report—titled “Saving America’s Story”—claims the exhibits at the Smithsonian’s flagship National Museum of American History were “prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.” According to DPC director Vince Haley, “The bottom line is that there’s no national story at the National Museum of American History.” Based on the Smithsonian’s dwindling attendance figures, many Americans apparently agree.

Faced with these charges, the Smithsonian and its defenders have vacillated between two largely contradictory rebuttals. The first is that the Smithsonian is essentially doing what it has always done—impartially telling the American story—and is under attack from a president determined to substitute his own perspective for an honest historical account. The second rebuttal is that the Smithsonian’s greatly increased emphasis on racial and sexual discrimination, current political issues, and social activism—in lieu of a more traditional and favorable account of American history—is a welcome development that the Trump administration is unfortunately seeking to reverse. The first explanation casts the Smithsonian as the innocent victim; the second portrays it as the righteous avenger.

Expressing that latter view, Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott writes that Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch—who recently announced that he’ll retire at year’s end—“has been an enormously consequential leader.” Kennicott elaborates: “Never has the nation more urgently needed to focus on key issues, like climate change and its long history of racial, ethnic and class division,” rather than on “the happy narrative of American exceptionalism.” For those who share this conception of the proper role of our national museums, Bunch has been the right man for the job.

In his 2019 book A Fool’s Errand, Bunch criticized a museum profession “awash in whiteness” and expressed his desire “to help Americans grapple with their own culpability in creating a society based on slavery.” He has also said that he wants museums “to make diversity and inclusion so central that it’s no longer talked about,” and that museums should “inspire new generations of activists.” His worldview is particularly evident at the National Museum of American History, where exhibits opened under his watch—and that of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director for the past seven years—excessively prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion over telling America’s story. The museum now devotes more square footage to displays about lowrider cars and salsa music than to displays about the American Founding.

Americans (and foreign tourists) have apparently noticed the Smithsonian’s recent transformation, and they’re voting with their feet. According to the institution’s own statistics, in 2018—the last full pre-Bunch (and pre-Hartig) year—the number of visits to the Smithsonian was 28.5 million. In 2025, it was 14.9 million. In other words, the Smithsonian had barely over half as many visits in 2025 as in 2018. (When tallying attendance, the Smithsonian counts visits, not unique visitors. So, each time a given person walks into a particular museum, even multiple times in the same day, it counts as a separate visit.)

If we exclude numbers from the National Zoo, which hasn’t been overtaken by DEI—and, unsurprisingly, hasn’t declined in popularity—from this assessment, the Smithsonian lost even more than half of its attendance from 2018 to 2025: visits fell from 26.7 million to 13 million, a 51 percent drop.

To be sure, some of this decline is attributable to the Smithsonian’s long-term project of renovating and redesigning the National Air and Space Museum, which permitted only limited visitors during construction. Accordingly, visits to that museum fell from 6.2 million in 2018 to 1.9 million in 2025. In addition, the Smithsonian Castle, which had 1 million visits in 2018, was closed for renovation in 2025. But if we remove the National Air and Space Museum and the Castle from the equation, while again excluding the National Zoo, the number of visits to Smithsonian museums still fell by 43 percent from 2018 to 2025—from 19.5 million to 11.1 million.

This steep dropoff cannot be explained away by the fall 2025 federal government shutdown, which closed the Smithsonian museums for 33 days, from October 12 through November 13. Adjusting the number of visits upward to reflect that the museums were closed for 9 percent of the year (a generous assessment that assumes visits were evenly spread throughout the year) raises the 11.1 million tally to 12.2 million—still a 37 percent drop from the 19.5 million visits in 2018. And again, that’s even when excluding the National Air and Space Museum and the Castle (as well as the National Zoo).

The National Museum of American History fared worse than Smithsonian museums overall. From 2018 to 2025, its attendance fell from 4.1 million visits to just 1.8 million—a 56 percent decline. In other words, for every 100 visits that this museum logged in 2018, it saw only 44 in 2025. This says a lot about what Americans think of the nation’s central American history museum.

This precipitous decline in Smithsonian attendance cannot be blamed on nationwide trends. A survey conducted by the American Alliance of Museums found that the median American museum lost only 5 percent of its annual attendance from pre- to post-Covid, comparing 2019 to 2025. The Smithsonian’s attendance drop over that same timespan places it in the bottom 10 percent of all museums nationally. Roughly 90 percent of U.S. museums maintained at least 70 percent of their attendance over that period, but not the Smithsonian.

In short, Americans aren’t buying what the Smithsonian is selling—or, rather, since its museums don’t charge at the gate, Americans aren’t taking what the Smithsonian is freely giving away. (Taxpayers funnel more than $1 billion to the institution each year.) Most citizens don’t seem to share Lonnie Bunch’s fondness for reflexively criticizing, rather than appropriately celebrating, our nation “conceived in liberty.” Bunch’s tenure as secretary should certainly be judged at least in part by the Smithsonian’s sharp attendance decline under his leadership.