After abruptly terminating critical grants to libraries, museums, and archives across the country last week, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) intends to redirect some of its funds to construct President Donald Trump’s bizarre “National Garden of American Heroes.”
Initially proposed in a 2020 executive order, the National Garden of American Heroes revolves around the construction of an outdoor sculpture park honoring a strange mix of nearly 250 “historically significant Americans” to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States on July 4, 2026.
Under the original order, the list of individuals to be honored spanned a wide range of fields, including sports, pop culture, and civil rights activism but also right-wing politics and settler colonialism. The likenesses of musician Aretha Franklin, athlete Muhammad Ali, chef and author Julia Child, and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would stand side-by-side with those of Christopher Columbus, Ronald Reagan, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Colt, who mass-produced the revolver.
In January 2021, before leaving office, Trump mandated that one-twelfth of the discretionary funds of the NEH and its sister agency the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) be directed toward the project. Though it was revoked under the Biden administration, the project was reinstated this year in a Trump executive order that called for it to be carried out “as expeditiously as possible.”
During a meeting of the NEH’s advisory council yesterday, April 9, the agency’s Acting Chair Michael McDonald relayed the plans to use the NEH funding to support Trump’s project, as first reported by the New York Times.
Hyperallergic has contacted the NEH and members of its advisory council for comment.
The news comes in the wake of a cascade of grant termination notices received by organizations nationwide from both the NEH and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), another federal agency that funds arts and culture initiatives. AFGE Local 3403, the union representing these agencies’ workers, estimates that “over a thousand” IMLS awards were cut overnight yesterday.
It’s the latest development in the Trump administration’s broader attack on arts and culture funding and programming, including an executive order that weaponizes the Smithsonian Institution to whitewash history and erase critical race theory and trans people. The order also directed the secretary of the interior to reinstall dismantled monuments, many of them tributes to Confederate generals toppled during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. Trump first proposed the National Garden of American Heroes in a speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3, 2020, during which he also decried the removal of the racist monuments.