Lonnie Bunch Will Retire as Smithsonian Secretary—Who Chooses His Successor?

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III will retire at the end of 2026 after seven years leading the United States’ largest museum complex. The timing puts the choice of his successor in the hands of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents while the White House is pressing that same board to change how the institution’s museums interpret American history.

 
 

Lonnie Bunch Will Leave at the End of the Year

The Smithsonian’s September 8 retirement announcement says Bunch will conclude nearly 38 years of service to the institution by the end of the calendar year. The notice and the retirement announcement occurred on the same date; his departure is not immediate. Board chair Franklin D. Raines said an acting secretary would be announced and a national search begun “in due course,” without naming a candidate or timetable.

Bunch told The Washington Post that White House pressure played no role, that he had considered retirement for about a year and that family time drove the choice. The Associated Press and Hyperallergic placed the departure amid the administration’s campaign against Smithsonian exhibitions. Bunch says the White House campaign did not cause his retirement, while historians and colleagues told The New York Times that the pressure had made it virtually impossible for him to stay.

Bunch became the 14th secretary in June 2019, the first African American and first historian in the post. His defining institutional achievement preceded that appointment. As founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture from 2005, he took the museum from a staff of one, with no building or collection, to its September 2016 opening on the National Mall. The Smithsonian says it has since received more than 13 million visitors.

 

Lonnie G. Bunch III in 2021. Photograph by Robert Stewart for the Smithsonian Institution, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain; cropped.

 
 

The President Does Not Appoint the Smithsonian Secretary

The Smithsonian’s unusual public-trust structure matters more than a conventional presidential succession model. Its charter and Board of Regents bylaws assign election of the permanent secretary to the board. The president has no separate power in those documents to nominate or install the secretary, and the secretary is not a Cabinet officer.

The temporary and permanent appointments follow different rules. Federal law allows the Smithsonian chancellor—currently Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.—to designate an acting secretary in writing once the office is vacant. A permanent secretary must be elected by the Board of Regents at a meeting; federal law provides that eight regents constitute a quorum. The bylaws expressly exclude election of a secretary from actions that the board may take by written or electronic ballot, and they require any meeting that elects a secretary to be held in Washington, D.C.

The acting appointment can be made in writing for the vacancy that begins after Bunch leaves, but the permanent appointment requires a board meeting in the capital. The Smithsonian’s public calendar lists October 26 as the next regular 2026 board meeting and January 25 as its first in 2027; the bylaws also permit special and emergency meetings. None of those dates is yet identified as a succession vote.

The institution says only that an acting leader will be announced and a national search will begin. It has not publicly named an acting secretary, a search committee, application process or selection date. Previous Smithsonian secretary searches have used ad hoc search committees, but that history does not establish the shape of the coming search.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III in 2021. Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons; public domain.

 
 

How White House Influence Can Still Reach the Search

The absence of a direct presidential appointment does not make the process politically sealed. The 17-seat Board of Regents is composed of the chief justice and vice president ex officio, six members of Congress and nine citizen regents. Citizen regents are nominated by the board, appointed through a joint resolution of Congress and then signed into law by the president. Vice President JD Vance already has a vote on the body that will choose the secretary.

The White House made that channel explicit. Trump’s March 27, 2025 executive order directed Vance to pursue its museum policy through his regent role and to work with congressional leaders to seek citizen regents committed to that policy. It also directed the Office of Management and Budget and Interior Department to pursue funding and other measures within their authority. That is evidence of intended influence through governance and federal leverage, not evidence that Trump personally controls the final vote.

Pressure has since moved from rhetoric to specific exhibition and operating demands. Trump said in May 2025 that he had fired National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet; the regents replied that personnel authority rested with the secretary under their oversight, although Sajet subsequently resigned. The White House then demanded records and content reviews at eight museums, issued a July 4, 2026 report accusing Smithsonian leaders of ideological activism, and on July 24 ordered federal officials to use available authorities to press for changes.

An August 28 letter went directly to the regents and threatened executive-agency support involving artifact loans, procurement and discretionary grants under the institution’s current leadership. A document-based review of that Smithsonian threat found that the letter identified possible leverage but no canceled loan, contract or grant. The administration is addressing and pressuring the appointing body, but the Board of Regents retains the formal appointment power.

 
 

What the Leadership Change Means for the Museums

The secretary is not merely an administrator above a loose federation. Under the bylaws, the secretary implements policies approved by the regents, directs Smithsonian employees and defines the operating structure. Museum directors sit inside that chain. The next secretary will therefore influence how the institution answers demands about labels, object selection, public programs and scholarly review across 21 museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Those art museums were among the eight named in the White House’s initial review. The dispute is consequently about more than one American-history gallery: it reaches the institutional conditions under which curators frame art, race, national identity and power. A successor’s response could affect exhibition approvals and leadership relationships even if no presidential official can directly rewrite a museum label.

 

Bunch’s Museum-Building Legacy Sets the Standard

Bunch’s strongest answer to that pressure is embedded in a museum rather than a statement. The National Museum of African American History and Culture joined difficult history, major collections and a prominent work of contemporary museum architecture without treating national achievement and national failure as mutually exclusive. Its tenth anniversary later this month makes the succession especially resonant: the institution he built is now one of the central objects of the administration’s interpretive campaign.

The next secretary also inherits planning for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and National Museum of the American Latino, along with a capital campaign that the Smithsonian says has passed its $2.5 billion goal. These are curatorial and collection-building decisions as well as financial ones. The choice will help determine whether the Smithsonian continues Bunch’s model of expanding whose objects and histories count as part of the national narrative.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in April 2025. Photograph by Frypie via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

 
 

The Appointment Rules Are Clear; the Candidates Are Not

What remains unresolved is institutional rather than procedural: who the regents will choose, and whether that leader will defend curatorial independence while responding to federal pressure. For the Smithsonian’s art museums, the answer will be visible not only in governance statements but in which exhibitions proceed, how labels explain contested history and whether directors retain room to follow evidence.