Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will spend $84,000 of taxpayer money on about a dozen signs outside the National Museum of American History telling visitors the exhibits inside are inaccurate. He put it in writing, in a September 3 letter to Senators Jeff Merkley and Lisa Murkowski obtained by The Atlantic, which reported it Tuesday.
The National Park Service will build the signs and plant them on the sidewalks and federal land it manages around the museum on the National Mall. Burgum pays for them out of Interior's own budget. Nobody has drafted the wording. Nobody has decided what the signs will look like. Burgum already has the price.
Two senators asked for it. Murkowski is a Republican from Alaska. She and Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, wrote to Burgum after Donald Trump signed his late-July order telling Interior to post "temporary exhibits or signage" outside the museum "warning" visitors about "the Ideological Capture" of the building.
Narativ covered the first of these orders on August 20, 2025, when Trump told the Smithsonian to stop teaching what he did not like. Thirteen months later his government is paying to post the message at the front door.
Burgum told the senators what the signs are for, the White House drafted the museum a warning label on July 4, and the museum's director answered Congress last week — all of it below.
