Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Monday that the agency-themed museum established by the Biden administration will be shut down.
The Washington, D.C., museum — known formally as the National Environmental Museum and Education Center — was opened in May 2024 under the Biden administration. Then-EPA Administrator Michael Regan hailed it as a facility that “chronicles our nation’s work to protect public health and the environment” at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Now, President Donald Trump’s EPA is closing the museum less than a year after its grand opening, with Zeldin citing needless expense to taxpayers, low numbers of visitors and politicized content.
“I’m currently standing inside of this museum, which was built and curated by the Biden administration with $4 million in taxpayer dollars,” said Zeldin. “As if this wasn’t enough of a price tag, to fill a room the size of an apartment, this shrine to environmental justice and climate change costs the American taxpayer $600,000 to operate annually … I have pledged to be an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars. So, this shrine to EJ and climate change will now be shut down for good.”
The museum, located at EPA headquarters, cost taxpayers approximately $4 million to build and $600,000 to operate annually, according to the agency. The center attracted less than 2,000 total external visitors between May 2024 and February 2025.
Admission to the museum was free for the months that it was open to the public, with taxpayers spending about $315 per external visitor, according to the Trump EPA. Examples of estimated annual operating expenses for the museum include about $123,000 for landscaping, another $123,000 for utilities and an additional $54,000 for artifact storage.
Additionally, the Biden administration appears to have politicized the museum’s exhibits, seeming to favor content pertaining to climate change and “environmental justice” over the agency’s core mission and work, according to the Trump EPA. Moreover, the museum essentially neglects to cover the period of time between 2014 and January 2021, and it also promotes the achievements of EPA under Democrat administrations to a greater extent than it does for Republican administrations.
“There is something ironic about the EPA wasting money on a museum about itself when it is supposed to be focused on toxic waste,” Rod Law, communications director for the Functional Government Institute, said in a statement. “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 museum’s closure is the latest step the Trump EPA has taken to walk back the Biden EPA’s agenda since January. To date, the Trump EPA has moved to terminate billions of dollars in Biden-era grants to politically-connected nonprofits, roll back a host of stringent Biden EPA regulations and cut agency offices focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion,” among other actions.
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