The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently shuttered the National Environmental Museum, located inside the federal agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In a statement issued on March 31, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the closure would save taxpayers about $600,000 per year. The small museum was created in 2016, dedicated to the nation’s environmental history, and included exhibits about prevention measures during the Covid-19 pandemic, environmental justice, and efforts to address climate change.
The closure comes less than a year after a $4 million expansion of the National Environmental Museum and Education Center opened last May.
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“It tells the story of the EPA from its founding under President Richard Nixon through some of its greatest success stories improving human health and environmental outcomes for the American people, including under Republican and Democratic presidents,” a former federal official familiar with the museum told The New York Post this week.
Zeldin described the EPA museum to the New York Times as a “one-room, little-trafficked museum” mostly visited by agency staff members. The museum also included exhibits about environmental issues experienced by poor and minority communities, displays which Zeldin described as having a “political agenda” under the Biden administration.
“Gone are the days of funding partisan pet projects at the detriment of the American taxpayers and the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment,” Zeldin told the Times, adding that the institution “conveniently omits any environmental progress” made during President Trump’s first term, during which 112 air and water protections were rolled back. However, the EPA museum did mention the signing of a law eliminating a type of greenhouse gas in 2020, as well as displays on all the previous administrators of the federal agency, including Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler, both of whom served during President Trump’s first term in office.
According to Zeldin, the museum’s annual costs included $123,000 for cleaning and landscaping, $207,000 for security guards, $54,000 for magnetometer and X-ray maintenance, about $54,000 for storage, and about $40,000 for maintenance of audiovisual equipment.
The closure of the EPA’s small museum follows President Trump’s recent executive order targeting the Smithsonian, a federal consortium of cultural and research institutions, to eliminate “divisive” and “anti-American” content from its exhibitions and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed from public spaces since 2020.
The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order gives Vice President JD Vance the authority to determine what content is “improper” at the Smithsonian Institution. A fact sheet from the White House also described the order as being opposed to “anti-American ideology.”
Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy EPA administrator from 2014 until 2017, was blunt in his response about the agency’s decision to close its small museum. “I doubt very much this is about cost savings,” Meiburg told the Times. “It’s about trying to erase the past.”