Congress Halts Army Plan to Close Museums Holding Irreplaceable History

The U.S. Army has frozen plans to close more than two dozen of its museums after Congress passed legislation barring the service from doing so without formal justification and lawmaker approval.

The U.S. Army Center of Military History said in a statement it "has paused all previously announced changes to the Army Museum Enterprise, including proposed museum closures, in accordance with the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026."

The Plan to Close Army Museums

The Center of Military History announced the plan in June 2025, calling for the Army Museum Enterprise to downsize from 41 facilities to 12 field museums and four training support facilities. Closures were set to begin last summer and run through fiscal year 2029. 

Army officials pitched the cuts as a way to redirect money and manpower toward "readiness and lethality," language drawn from an April 2025 memo in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Army to shed outdated programs and rebuild a more lethal force.

The Army had another motive for closing some museums. Many of them sit in aging buildings with growing maintenance backlogs. Chronic understaffing has left curators unable to properly care for artifacts or give visitors a worthwhile experience. The center concluded the Army could no longer sustain the current museum organization.

Army officials said the plan was internal to the service, years in development, and not imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency or the new administration.

Charles R. Bowery Jr., the Center of Military History's executive director, said the museum enterprise remains a collection that "trains and acculturates soldiers and connects the Army to American society."

The Army estimated that the closures would cost about $24 million over four fiscal years. Most of the bill would go toward moving more than 119,000 artifacts to regional storage facilities at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and Anniston Army Depot, Alabama.

Congress stepped in just months later. The fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law in December, blocked the Army from moving forward without congressional oversight. The law orders Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to formally stand up a museum system and conduct a full review of every facility before any closures. 

If the Army proposes future closures, it must notify Congress, lay out where every artifact and exhibit will go, detail plans for displaced employees and show it has reached out to local groups about potential public-private partnerships. A mandatory 90-day waiting period follows.

The congressional pushback was bipartisan. Rep. Marilyn Strickland, D-Wash., wrote the Army secretary in June 2025 to oppose closing the Lewis Army Museum at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the only Army museum on the West Coast. 

Strickland told the Army secretary the country should be "expanding opportunities to pay tribute to the Army's legacy." 

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., pushed to spare the Harbor Defense Museum at Fort Hamilton, the only military museum in New York City. Other lawmakers joined in, defending facilities from Kansas to upstate New York. 

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, followed with her own letter, putting the fight in front of the committee that controls the Army's budget.

The Army was the only service hit with potential closures. The NDAA grandfathered in the Navy and Air Force, both of which already ran formal museum systems under centralized command. The Navy operates 10 official museums under its Naval History and Heritage Command. 

The Air Force consolidated most of its institutional history, including more than 350 aircraft and missiles at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The Army never centralized that way, leaving it the largest, least centralized and least prepared museum system of the three.

What the Museums Represent

The Rock Island Arsenal Museum opened on July 4, 1905, making it the second-oldest in the Army after West Point. It holds Serial No. 1 of the Model 1903 Springfield rifle, which Rock Island itself manufactured by the hundreds of thousands during World War I. It also holds Serial No. 2 of the M1 Garand, five rifles carried by Sioux or Cheyenne warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and a pair of Rappahannock Forge wall guns from the Revolution. 

The museum had just reopened in June 2023 after a $2 million renovation when it landed on the closure list. 

The Frontier Army Museum at Fort Leavenworth, the oldest active Army post west of the Mississippi, was also on the chopping block. It documents the Army's role in the trans-Mississippi West from the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1804 through Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing's 1916 hunt for Pancho Villa. 

Its 7,000 artifacts include an 1832 general officer's coat worn by Henry Leavenworth, who founded the post in 1827 and gave it his name, a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny biplane of the type Pershing's aviators flew in Mexico, a sleigh that belonged to George Armstrong Custer and a carriage that once belonged to Abraham Lincoln.

Museum specialist Megan Hunter told Army public affairs in May 2025, a month before the closure plan dropped, that visitors at Fort Leavenworth see only about a quarter of the collection because the building is a 1941 Quonset hut never meant to be a museum. The 34-star flag from when Kansas joined the Union sits in storage, along with countless other artifacts that each tell an important story in U.S. Army history.

The 10th Mountain Division and Fort Drum Museum was also slated to close. It holds a story no other museum displays. A civilian, National Ski Patrol founder Charles Minot Dole, conceived the unit during the World War II buildup, lobbying Washington for soldiers who could fight in the mountains. The division trained at Camp Hale, Colorado, deployed to Italy in 1945 and seized Riva Ridge and Mount Belvedere in some of the steepest, coldest fighting of the European campaign. 

The museum holds the alpine gear, skis, snowshoes and an M29 Weasel snow vehicle from those operations, plus watercolors painted in the field by Pfc. Arnold J. Roberts of the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, who earned a Bronze Star at Mount Belvedere. The same division is now the most-deployed in the modern Army. The physical record of the division’s storied history sits in one museum building.

Meanwhile, the Harbor Defense Museum at Fort Hamilton sits inside a 19th-century caponier on a post where Robert E. Lee once served as an engineer. It draws about 14,000 visitors a year, most of them schoolchildren. Closing it would erase the only military museum in a city of 8 million where the Army's active presence is otherwise nearly invisible.

What Comes Next

The Center of Military History has to start over. Its historians will evaluate the entire network and recommend which facilities should receive renovations or be closed and how the system should be structured going forward. The first time around, officials weighed each building's upkeep costs, visitor numbers, public access and relevance to the broader Army. Senior leaders are expected to see the new recommendations later this year, though no firm timeline exists for a final decision or congressional review.

There is a potential path that lets museums survive without relying solely on the Army. Several of the service's largest museums run as public-private partnerships, with a foundation handling fundraising and construction while the Army operates the museum once it opens. The National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia, never on the closure list, has run that way for years and is the model the Army points to.

Another example is taking shape at Fort Campbell, where a foundation-driven project predates the closure debate. The Fort Campbell Historical Foundation built a new 40,000-square-foot facility on the Tennessee side of the post and gifted it to the Army. The Tennessee Wings of Liberty Museum opens May 15, replacing the Don F. Pratt Museum, which closed in November 2024. 

Retired Maj. Gen. Brian Winski, the foundation's president, told Clarksville Now the museum will be "maintained by the Army and run by the Army in perpetuity."

The Army told Strickland in March that leaders at Joint Base Lewis-McChord are exploring a public-private option for the Lewis Army Museum.

For the museums staring down closure just months ago, the pause is a slight reprieve. Whether it becomes permanent will depend on what the review finds, what Congress does with it and whether the case for each museum to remain open in 2026 still holds in the years that follow. For the moment, in the year America turns 250, the Army's history will remain in place.