Women's museum bill defeated in House

Source: Roll Call

Posted May 21, 2026 at 6:19pm, Updated at 7:23pm


A once-bipartisan effort broke down Thursday as the House rejected a bill to pave the way for construction of a Smithsonian museum honoring women. Previously championed by both sides of the aisle, the legislation saw last-minute changes at a House Administration Committee markup in March that led Democrats to withdraw their backing. The new version would prohibit exhibits from including transgender women or girls, as well as give the final say on location to President Donald Trump.

“They have shown that they are willing to destroy a bipartisan bill in order to respond to the White House,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., who chairs the Democratic Women’s Caucus. The bill would allow the museum to be built within the reserve of the National Mall, an area where construction is tightly restricted. Although the bill names the South Monument site across from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, it would also give the president the ability to “designate an alternative site” at his discretion.

Democrats have decried the changes as a “poison pill” that derailed years of work. The floor vote this week was supposed to be a chance for Republicans to position themselves as defenders of women’s rights and to paint their opponents as unsympathetic to the cause. “They claim, the other side, to be the party of women … [but] it will be the Republican majority in Congress that gets this done,” the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, N.Y., said earlier Thursday on the floor.

But Republicans couldn’t stay united to pass the bill on their own, with several of their members breaking away to vote with Democrats to defeat it. GOP leaders circulated around the chamber, trying to convince the holdouts. Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who voted against the bill despite being a co-sponsor of it, said there wasn’t a need for a stand-alone museum about women. “Show me where in the Smithsonian women are being discriminated against. To me, we ought to be about unifying instead of separating,” he said.

Read more: https://rollcall.com/2026/05/21/women-museum-bill-house-vote/