ASEH Statement on Closure of EPA Museum

The American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) is issuing the following statement on the March 31, 2025 decision by EPA chief Lee Zeldin to close the museum at its Washington, DC headquarters: 

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Director Lee Zeldin’s recent order to close the EPA’s National Environmental Museum and Education Center is a suppression of historical knowledge about the agency’s defense of environmental and public health. Here is what Zeldin had to say.

The EPA museum provided historical interpretation of the agency’s work on pollution control, toxic remediation, and climate change. The museum fostered a broad historical understanding of environmental activism and policy. A first edition copy of Silent Spring conveyed how Rachel Carson’s account of the lethal effects of chemical pollutants on birdlife fueled the environmental movement. A display on the Asarco copper smelter in Ruston, Washington, detailed arsenic contamination and Superfund remediation in an urban community. Another exhibit explained the cleanup after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in 2010. The museum conveyed stories of communities mobilizing for cleaner environments and of scientists and policymakers who provided expertise. The museum also offered a “Future Scientist Series” that informed children about how EPA employees in science, technology, engineering, and math fields apply their knowledge to protect public health and the environment. 

Critics of the museum point to its annual operating costs of $600,000 per year without acknowledging that this expenditure provides valuable public education. That cost amounts to six thousandths of one percent of the EPA’s budget.  Closing it now also wastes the $4 million spent expanding the museum, which re-opened in its current location at EPA headquarters in 2024. The EPA estimates the benefits of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 are $2 trillion. It is well worth investing in the EPA’s museum to remember such accomplishments.

The Environmental Protection Agency has played a formative role in improving public health and the quality of the environment since its creation in 1970. Shuttering a museum that highlights both those accomplishments and the persistent issues of environmental injustice is a disservice both to the agency and the American people.  Ending the museum’s educational programs will prevent the public from learning about how scientists and policymakers can work together to protect communities and ecosystems. 

At a moment when the Trump administration is undermining the EPA’s ability to protect human health and the environment by reducing its budget and staff, closing the museum is yet another example of a short-sighted cost-cutting measure that overlooks the critical role the EPA has played in American life. Zeldin must reverse this erasure of the work of the EPA—past, present, and future—from public consciousness.