Protecting Our History Act of 2026

Congress finds the following:

(1) The National Museum of African American History and Culture Act (20 U.S.C. 80r et seq.), established the National Museum of African American History and Culture (hereinafter the NMAAHC) as a unit of the Smithsonian Institution, created the NMAAHC Council, and directed the Smithsonian to develop a national collection, exhibitions, and educational programming documenting the African American experience.

(2) The NMAAHC was established pursuant to decades of advocacy, including by Representative John Lewis, who introduced predecessor legislation for nearly twenty years before bipartisan consensus was achieved in the 108th Congress. The museum’s bipartisan founding reflects an enduring national consensus that African American history is American history.

(3) The House and Senate Reports accompanying the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act—H. Rept. 108–429 and S. Rept. 108–340—establish that Congress intended the NMAAHC Council to exercise substantive subject matter authority over the museum’s collections, exhibitions, interpretive frameworks, educational programming, and scholarly integrity, and that the Board of Regents was expected to defer to the Council on all interpretive matters absent a legal or institutional conflict.

(4) The NMAAHC’s exhibitions, collections, and scholarship affirm that Black history is American history, and that the comprehensive telling of America’s story requires the preservation and protection of African American history, culture, and lived experience.

(5) The Federal Government has a compelling national interest in ensuring that the NMAAHC remains a trusted, nonpartisan steward of truthful historical documentation, interpretation, and public education, consistent with the congressional mandate of the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act.

(6) Attempts at censorship, political manipulation, or the erasure of historically documented facts from the NMAAHC’s exhibitions and programming undermine public trust, weaken democratic institutions, and distort the educational mission entrusted to the Smithsonian by Congress and the American people.

(7) When the executive branch conditions Federal funding or directs curatorial content at the NMAAHC without the authority of an Act of Congress, it usurps the legislative prerogatives of Congress, contravenes the Impoundment Control Act, and inflicts direct injury on the NMAAHC Council whose statutory mission fiduciary duties are thereby frustrated.