Tucked away near the White House is a tribute to the environmental agency and its history — for the time being, anyway.
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.
Displays include the pen that President Lyndon B. Johnson used to sign amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1967; a bottle of “100 Percent Authentic Undiluted Polluted” water (a gag, presumably) from Boston’s notorious harbor, which was finally cleaned up in the 1990s; a scratched gray seat from a New York City subway car, to illustrate testing that E.P.A. scientists conducted in 2020 to learn whether the coronavirus spread on surfaces; the second issue of The E.P.A. Journal, with a moody cover image of sunlight bursting through a thicket of trees; and the first edition of “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s landmark account of the widespread harm caused by the pesticide DDT.
“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.”