Bunch Resigns as Smithsonian Secretary
By • September 10, 2026 0 399
On Sept. 8, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, 73, announced his resignation. He is expected to depart the Smithsonian — named for founding donor James Smithson, a British chemist and mineralogist — by the end of the year.
“It was really just saying, now’s the time,” Bunch told the New York Times, adding: “I have to be honest, it has been stressful.”
The Smithsonian’s 17-member board of regents — three U.S. senators and three U.S. representatives, nine private citizens, Vice President JD Vance and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who holds the title of chancellor — is responsible for appointing a new secretary, effectively the institution’s CEO. Three of the board’s citizen seats are vacant.
“We look forward to working with [Bunch] in the coming months to ensure a smooth transition for his successor,” said Roberts in a statement.
Having served since June 15, 2019, Bunch, the 14th secretary since the institution’s 1846 establishment, will have occupied the post for about seven and a half years. Founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in September of 2016, he joined the Smithsonian in 1978, holding curatorial positions at the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History prior to his appointment as president of the Chicago History Museum in 2000.
His immediate predecessor as secretary, cardiologist and former Cornell University president David Skorton, served four years. Before Skorton came engineer and former Georgia Tech president G. Wayne Clough, six and a half years; businessman Lawrence Small, seven years; lawyer and former University of California, Berkeley, chancellor I. Michael Heyman, five years; and anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams, 10 years.
It was the eighth secretary, S. Dillon Ripley — father of Sylvia Ripley, the Ripley of Georgetown’s Addison/Ripley Fine Art — who visibly enlarged and transformed the Smithsonian, which calls itself “the world’s largest museum, education and research complex” (with, by its count, 21 museums plus the National Zoo).
Between 1964 and 1984, the entrepreneurial Ripley, an ornithologist who had been director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, conceived the nearly entirely underground Quadrangle Complex, comprising the National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of Asian Art — which finessed restrictions on the Freer Gallery of Art’s collection by attaching the new Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (name deemphasized) — and an education, theater, gallery and office facility named the S. Dillon Ripley Center. Another of his initiatives, the Anacostia Neighborhood (later Community) Museum, opened in 1967.
Bunch’s accomplishments have also been of major importance. The spectacular, largely unclouded success of the National Museum of African American History and Culture — given its visibility and associated sensitivities — is hard to imagine without Bunch. Few expected that a curator, even one familiar with the Smithsonian bureaucracy, could become so adept at raising funds and building political alliances. As secretary, Bunch created a new under secretary for education position, made progress on the issues of repatriation and human remains and moved two new museum projects forward (see below).
He has also done his best to fend off ideological attacks. The pressure on the Smithsonian by the Trump administration, using the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as its playbook, has been widely reported. Though independent, the Smithsonian is vulnerable: about two-thirds of its budget, roughly one billion dollars, comes from the federal government and two-thirds of its approximately 6,500 workers are federal employees.
As directed by a Jan. 20, 2025, executive order, the Smithsonian closed its diversity office (as did the National Gallery, which is not a Smithsonian museum). Two months later, President Trump assigned Vance and White House official Lindsey Halligan to police the institution’s “improper ideology.”
Then, that May, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he was firing National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet due to her partisanship and support for DEI. Though the Smithsonian and others responded that the hiring and firing of directors was the secretary’s prerogative, Sajet resigned; she later became the Milwaukee Art Museum’s director.
Among the flashpoints for the Portrait Gallery were the portrait of Trump and accompanying text in the America’s Presidents gallery and a painting, “Trans Forming Liberty,” that was to be included in a 2025 Amy Sherald exhibition. Sherald (who painted Michelle Obama for the Portrait Gallery) pulled the show, which was presented instead at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Later that year, there was a tug of war over the space shuttle Discovery, on view, still, at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.
While complying with White House demands for a mountain of exhibition and other curatorial materials from eight Smithsonian museums, Bunch and the regents put an internal review into effect.
Symbolically, on July 4 this year, a 162-page White House Domestic Policy Council report, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” was released. The report called National Museum of American Art Director Anthea M. Hartig “an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.” House Republicans organized hearings that month at which Hartig testified.
This sustained assault is in line with the administration’s broader effort to bring cultural and intellectual centers — the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, universities, etc. — to heel.
In addition to the Portrait Gallery vacancy, there are currently at least two director openings at Smithsonian museums, though Lynda Roscoe Hartigan just started at the Smithsonian American Art Museum/Renwick Gallery. Hirshhorn Museum Director Melissa Chiu recently announced her departure for the Guggenheim and the NMAAHC, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this fall, has an acting director, Shanita Brackett.
Also of concern: the future of the two new Smithsonian museums approved by Congress: the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Smithsonian antagonist Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at Heritage, has taken particular issue with the Latino Museum, now operating within the National Museum of American History. To avoid a battle over the museum’s location on a National Park Service-owned site on the National Mall, and reduce its construction budget, the Smithsonian announced last month that NMAL would occupy the existing Arts and Industries Building, an 1881 structure next to the original 1855 Smithsonian building, known as the Castle.
In a remarkably candid book, “A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama and Trump,” published in 2019, the year he left NMAAHC to become Smithsonian secretary, Bunch wrote:
“One can tell a great deal about a country by what it remembers. By what graces the wall of its museums. And what monuments have privileged placement in parks or central traffic intersections. And what holidays and patriotic songs are the bane and balm to generations of school children. Yet one learns even more about a nation by what it forgets. What moments of evil, disappointment and defeat are downplayed or eliminated from the national narratives. Often in the United States the issues of race and the centrality of African American culture are given short shrift in textbooks, popular chronicles and national memories. These issues became goals the museum hoped its vision could help address and assuage.”
