White House orders the Smithsonian to submit its exhibits for review.

The Office of Management and Budget sent the Smithsonian a letter on Tuesday. Eight museums. The American History one. The African American History one. The American Indian one. Air and Space. Natural History. Two of the art museums. Hirshhorn.

The letter says: please send us your exhibition texts, your social media posts, your curatorial process, your grant documents, your visitor surveys, and your inventory. We will review them. We have given you thirty days, seventy-five days, and one hundred twenty days to comply. We will be checking for “divisive or partisan narratives.”

Hon. The Smithsonian is the museum complex of the United States of America. It has been there since 1846. It is on the National Mall. It is paid for, in part, by the same taxes that pay for the OMB. The federal government and the Smithsonian are not strangers. They do not need to file paperwork to know each other.

What is happening here is that the exhibition copy — the little white cards next to the dinosaur, the panels next to the lunch counter from Greensboro, the wall text in the Wright Brothers room — is now subject to White House sign-off. Not the funding of the museums. Not the staffing of the museums. The captions on the displays.

There is a list of countries where the captions on the displays go to a central office for approval. The list is short, and it does not include any country I would like to live in.

The Smithsonian curators are some of the best-trained people in their fields in the world. They write captions for a living. They went to graduate school for it. The OMB writes budget memos for a living. They went to graduate school for that. These are not the same job.

You ever notice how the people who say they want history “depoliticized” always seem to want it depoliticized into something specific.

That ought to concern you.