In a city where world-class masterpieces sit in marble temples that line the National Mall, the small museum devoted to the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, tucked away in a federal building near the White House, has not exactly inspired much fanfare. But as President Trump and Elon Musk slash and burn their way through Washington’s federal bureaucracy, this humble tribute to the E.P.A.’s mission of curbing pollution and fighting climate change somehow remains open — perhaps as a symbol of resilience, possibly because nobody knows that the museum exists.
The National Environmental Museum and Education Center, as the E.P.A. museum is known, opened in 2024 on the ground floor of the imposing William Jefferson Clinton Building North on Pennsylvania Avenue. The space is small but bright, in contrast with the drab exhibit in a nearby federal building that served as a beta version of the museum while the permanent one was being designed.
With the Trump administration threatening potentially huge staff and budget cuts, the museum could soon come to serve as a testament to a hobbled, diminished agency.
“It was really a labor of love,” said Stan Meiburg, who served as acting deputy E.P.A. administrator from 2014 until 2017. Dr. Meiburg recalled that the inspiration for a tribute to the E.P.A.’s work came after Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, toured an environmental museum during a 2015 visit to Japan. “That was really all it took,” Dr. Meiburg recalled in an interview. “People were tremendously enthusiastic about it.”
Some still are. State Senator Nate Blouin, Democrat of Utah, was in Washington last summer, with a little time before his flight back home, when he “stumbled across” the museum — and found himself delightfully surprised. “I thoroughly enjoyed wandering through the space and even came across an exhibit that gave a shout-out to Salt Lake City’s public bike program,” Mr. Blouin wrote in an email. “It would be a shame to see the work that was already done honoring the country’s environmental achievements be scrapped over political posturing.”
What may be posturing to Mr. Blouin has been a show of force to Mr. Trump and his supporters. A short walk from the Clinton North building is what used to be the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which in January became the first target of Mr. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The agency’s headquarters have been shuttered, with signage either covered up or removed, its work force thrown into chaos. Agencies across the executive branch are facing similar cuts, as well as mandates to comply with the president’s executive order to cancel all diversity initiatives — and an administration-wide initiative to remove references to climate change in agency communications, including websites.
Lee Zeldin, the new E.P.A. administrator, is a close ally of President Trump who ran unsuccessfully for the New York governorship in 2022 and has no evident experience in environmental conservation. Mr. Zeldin has canceled some $60 million in contracts tied to what a news release described as “wasteful D.E.I. and environmental justice initiatives,” using an abbreviation for diversity, equity and inclusion. The agency’s new “Powering the Great American Comeback” initiative aims to promote automotive manufacturing, artificial intelligence capacity and energy production — goals not generally considered to be within E.P.A.’s purview. Mr. Zeldin also celebrated the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” by promptly changing the name of the E.P.A.’s division focused on that region.
Mr. Zeldin has expressed eagerness to work with Mr. Musk, praising recent federal dismissals, and has hired industry figures, including a formaldehyde lobbyist, to the top ranks of the E.P.A.
Still, an official who works at the E.P.A.’s headquarters was cautiously sanguine. “I think I’m still feeling out new leadership,” the official said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. He said that the new E.P.A. officials had not been “quite as openly cruel and dismissive” as new political appointees in other agencies — or the E.P.A. appointees who served during Mr. Trump’s first term.
E.P.A. press officials did not respond to a request to comment.
Even as pillars of the federal government topple around it, the small E.P.A. museum stands. Access is free, but not without barriers. First, there is the entrance door, so heavy and unyielding that it is all too easy to assume that the building is closed. Eventually, a gesticulating guard indicates otherwise. Inside, an airport-style security check awaits, with separate bins for laptops and bags — this is, after all, a federal building.
For better or worse, there is no gift store.
On a recent afternoon, the E.P.A. played host to half a dozen or so students from the George Washington University. Their professor, a public health expert, stood near the museum’s entrance handing out worksheets. Inside, the students were greeted with a story that had unfurled largely before they were born: the creation of the E.P.A. by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970; the Love Canal toxic waste crisis of 1978, in western New York, which gave rise to the Superfund remediation program; the 1982 protest in Warren County, N.C., against the dumping of contaminated soil in a Black community; the federal response to the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout off the coast of Louisiana in 2010.
Perhaps understandably, the displays don’t have much to say about the chronic underfunding of the Superfund program. Nor about the numerous controversies that saw Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s first E.P.A. administrator, forced out of his position in 2018.
Dr. Meiburg, the former E.P.A. official, said he hoped that the Trump administration would realize Republicans and Democrats alike needed clean air and water — and that the president’s relentless cost cutters would keep the E.P.A. museum open because it was a testament to that work. “You keep this museum because it tells the actual story,” he said. “It’s not a partisan story.”
