WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin is canceling a year-old museum dedicated to the EPA’s history — citing its $315-per-visitor cost to operate.
The museum is located on the ground floor of the EPA, but recorded very little foot traffic, despite its prime location just a block north of the Smithsonian’s Natural History and American History museums on the National Mall.
“The scarcely visited museum cost a whopping $4 million taxpayer dollars to build in accordance with Smithsonian standards and more than $600,000 annually to operate,” an EPA official said.
“It had less than 2,000 external visitors between May 2024-February 2025 and while the museum was free, the cost to taxpayers per external visitor amounted to nearly $315 per person.”
The agency logged just 1,909 external visitors to the museum during the 10-month period.
The EPA opened the museum in unused space after Trump appointees axed a prior Obama-era museum in an even less-trafficked federal office space nearby.
Although the location was ideal for a museum, it wasn’t obvious to would-be visitors that it was even there, meaning that tourists were unlikely to enter its heavy doors without specifically seeking out the visit. Sometimes people would enter the doors mistakenly thinking it was the EPA’s offices.
The agency believed that the museum would attract school groups and that it would be used for education events, and at least some attempt was made to present the offering as non-partisan — including with a nod to COVID-19 disinfection efforts during Trump’s first term.
“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,” said a former federal official familiar with the museum.
The ex-official said that the cut appeared to be “symbolic” as Zeldin makes other reductions, including attempting to claw back some of the clean-energy grants awarded under former President Joe Biden.
“It’s not really reducing any significant costs. And it’s closing the EPA more to the public,” the person said.
Annual costs associated with the museum included about $207,000 for a two-person security guard team, $124,000 for cleaning and landscaping, $123,000 for utilities and $54,000 for artifact storage.
The cuts come as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative seeks to trim $4 billion a day from federal spending — with a goal of reducing the annual budget deficit by $1 trillion to halve the figure.
Rod Law, communications director of the Functional Government Initiative, praised the EPA museum’s demise.
“There is something ironic about the EPA wasting money on a museum about itself when it is supposed to be focused on toxic waste,” Law said.
“Sadly, promoting special interest climate activism and growing the out-of-touch bureaucracy were hallmarks of the EPA in the Biden administration, and this museum was an unfortunate result of such policy. Administrator Zeldin closing it protects taxpayers, helps return the EPA to its statutory mission of protecting the environment, and abandons past dysfunction and bureaucratic self-promotion.”
