“Free” Propaganda On Display For A Price

Most of us have visited a museum at some point in our lives. Museums are institutions that collect, preserve, interpret, and display objects of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance. Their purpose should be to educate the public and encourage learning, reflection, and engagement with various aspects of human history and culture. This is accomplished by displaying objects of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance for the study and education of the public, fostering learning, reflection, and engagement with diverse aspects of human history and civilization.

Education, like beauty, resides within the interpretation of the beholder. The far left often uses the premise of education for deception. One of the best examples is the current state of our education system. As a student, you attend school believing that the information you will be taught is the truth. Unfortunately, woke teachers use that expectation to deceive and introduce immorality under the guise of truth, ignoring science, biology, and reality.  

Seizing upon that concept, the Biden administration decided that a museum would be a good way to promote the lie of climate change. After all, a museum is another institution that people enter with a sense of anticipation, a place where they expect to learn something they previously didn’t know. They believed this was an opportunity to sway non-believers and to persuade those on the fence to join their side.

On the ground floor, inside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Biden administration spent an outrageous $4 million of taxpayers’ dollars to tell the EPA’s story and promote its lies about climate change.

Constructed to meet “Smithsonian standards,” an EPA official confirmed the $4 million construction cost, as well as the annual operating expense exceeding $600,000.

Even the real estate mantra of “location, location, location” couldn’t help this Biden boondoggle. Despite its prime location just a block north of the Smithsonian’s Natural History and American History museums on the National Mall, this disaster drew only 1,909 visitors between May 2024 and February 2025.

At that rate, the “free” admission actually costs taxpayers $315 per visitor. The EPA opened the attraction in unused office space after appointees from the Trump administration eliminated a previous museum from the Obama era in an even less-trafficked location nearby during Trump’s first term.

The delusional agency convinced itself that the museum would attract school groups and that it would be used for educational events. Weak efforts were made to present the offering as non-partisan, which included references to COVID-19 disinfection initiatives during Trump’s first term.

Although the location may appear well-suited for a museum, potential visitors often did not realize it was even there. That made it unlikely for tourists to enter it unless they were explicitly looking for it, and let’s be honest, … who in their right mind is looking for a museum highlighting the EPA? On occasion, people would stagger in by mistake, thinking it was the EPA’s offices.

A former federal employee familiar with the museum stated:

“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.”

Some of the costs associated with the museum were significant, including approximately $207,000 for a two-person security team, $124,000 for cleaning and landscaping, $123,000 for utilities, and $54,000 for artifact storage. These expenses proved too high to sustain the museum’s operation.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA Administrator, led the closure, calling the museum a “pet project” of the Biden administration that promoted partisan climate agendas and diverted resources from the EPA’s core mission of protecting public health and the environment.

Rod Law, the communications director of the Functional Government Initiative, praised the closure of the EPA museum.

“There is something ironic about the EPA wasting money on a museum about itself when it is supposed to be focused on toxic waste.”

“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.”

The left finds it impossible to impose any limits on their self-indulgent practices. The only lessons anyone can learn from this brick-and-mortar fraud are that nothing is truly free, and the EPA needs to rediscover its true focus.