In Detroit’s Milwaukee Junction neighborhood, once the epicenter of the automotive industry, the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant Museum preserves and shares an indelible piece of American history. Housed in the first factory built by the Ford Motor Company, the museum was once the birthplace of the Model-T. Until recently, however, it was also a massive fire hazard.

“We still had 100-year-old, cloth-covered wiring in this building, which is enormously flammable,” Jill Woodward, the museum’s president & CEO, told me. The threat of fire wasn’t just a theoretical possibility, either. In 2005, a former factory for Studebaker automobiles burned to the ground in a massive, five-alarm fire just a couple blocks from the museum. “There were volunteers here on the roof with a garden hose, making sure this building lasted through that,” Woodward said.

The aging electrical system was a huge problem. Aside from the obvious risk to the museum’s historic building and the cars and people inside it, the museum couldn’t take on any other needed improvements to the 67,000 square foot building—from HVAC to accessibility to, ironically, a fire-suppression system—without first upgrading and modernizing the electrical work. That project would cost about $2 million, more money than the museum generates in a year. “We couldn’t do any other projects without the power to run them,” Woodward said. Until she found the money to replace the electrical system, Woodward could focus on little else.

Today, the vast majority of museums in the United States face similar challenges. They have small budgets and historic buildings in desperate need of repair. They have leaky roofs, failing HVAC units, and hazardous entryways. What they don’t have is the money for repairs. Simply put, American museums are falling apart.

A federal report published by the Government Accountability office earlier this Spring paints a stark picture of the challenges museums face. It reveals that degraded facilities at about three-quarters of America’s more than 20,000 museums place either collections or people at risk. Without the money to make repairs or the time and expertise to raise it, many of these facility issues are deferred for years—until they become true emergencies. So, as buildings continue to deteriorate, pieces of the nation’s cultural heritage remain at risk of damage or destruction in thousands of communities across the country.

Notably, many museums’ heating, air conditioning, and ventilation systems are simply not capable of providing the stable environment and humidity control necessary to appropriately preserve their objects and artifacts. At other museums, issues that have long gone unaddressed leave them without the space to properly store the collections in their care. As a result, the report found that many museums resort to makeshift storage in basements, bathrooms, and closets. Museum staff and volunteers do what they can—propping objects up on temporary mounts to keep them off the ground of a damp basement, or performing collections triage to prioritize the care of their most valuable or most vulnerable assets—but there are few real solutions to these issues.

In the fall of 2024, for example, the Litchfield Historical Society in Connecticut needed an emergency roof repair. After years of patch repairs, it had finally begun to fail. Without the money to address it immediately, the museum staff waited: first for news about grant applications, then for the New England winter to give way to Spring. In the meantime, they scrambled. They closed the gift shop, where water had begun entering the building, and they cleared museum collections from several other spaces made vulnerable from the leak. When Litchfield finally completed its roof repair in April 2025 it only cost about $60,000—a relatively small sum as far as major infrastructure projects go, but it was still money the museum didn’t have when it needed it.

“This is not a rarity,” said Jessica Jenkins, the historical society’s executive director. “As a small organization, there’s rarely the year where we have excess in our budget at the end of the year, where we could start putting that directly into a capital fund.” While deferred maintenance stacks up for museums, the money to address it never does.

Finding money for repairs is thus a constant source of stress for museum leaders. At the Ford Piquette Plant Museum, it took Jill Woodward several years to raise the $2 million it needed for the electrical system replacement, through a combination of federal, state, and local grants and more than $300,000 in contributions from individual donors. She would have needed to raise even more if not for incredible contributions from the museum’s volunteers. One volunteer, Steve Shotwell, spent years as a volunteer project manager, providing time and expertise to the effort that would have otherwise raised costs considerably. “He was here every morning at 6:30 to meet the electricians,” Woodward said. “He’s in his late 70s and he was here 50 hours a week, for years. He’s just an amazing human being.” Jessica Jenkins at Litchfield Historical Society, meanwhile, was able to lean on a relationship with a local foundation for a grant to support its roof repair, but the process delayed repairs for months.

Yet getting through a single major renovation or emergency repair is never the end of the road. For most museums, another chronic issue or fresh disaster is always right around the corner. For example, even before the Ford Piquette Plant Museum completed its electrical system project—they finally finished work earlier this year—they already had to move on to another issue: accessibility. The museum had a single, aging freight elevator (one they still needed for moving cars), but they needed a better way to move guests between the museum’s several floors, particularly in the case of an emergency. The building had another elevator shaft, which could have reduced the project’s price tag, but unfortunately that space had been used years earlier to install restrooms. So, fresh off the completion of the $2 million electrical project, Woodward launched right back into fundraising, this time for a $1.5 million effort to relocate the restrooms and install a new elevator.

“If people don't have a place to use the restroom, and if there's no elevator to transport them between floors, we're out of business,” Woodward said. Other facilities issues loom for the museum as well. It needs to upgrade its security system. It needs UV blocking window film on its many, many windows to protect its collection from damage. It needs new emergency lights, a resurfaced parking lot, and, like nearly every single museum I spoke with, they need a new HVAC system. “People freeze in the winter and roast in the summer,” Woodward said. That kind of variability makes the space bad for collections, and perhaps even worse for people. “I’ve come into my office in the winter where it’s been 46 degrees in the morning,” Woodward told me. When we spoke over Zoom, Woodward sat next to a window unit air conditioner being asked to serve far, far too large a space. She estimates addressing this long list of repairs would cost between $15 and $20 million—money, needless to say, the museum doesn’t have.

After the roof repair at Litchfield Historical Society, Jenkins also turned her attention to the museum’s HVAC unit, which at 30 years old struggles with the precise temperature and humidity demands necessary to preserve the museum’s collections. “It’s hitting points where it can’t keep up,” Jenkins said. As the museum searches for the half million dollars it needs to replace it—a number that keeps getting larger the longer the project gets delayed—the museum has been forced to triage its collection, assessing the interpretive value and care needs of each object to determine which ones can withstand sub-optimal storage conditions. 

Keeping the current unit running, even inefficiently, temporarily frees up money for other needs. “We haven’t really had the money to do a full change-out, and it’s time,” Jenkins said. She regularly worries about when something big enough will finally break “that our technician can’t do a quick part swap to get it up and running. And when that happens, then what do we do?”

This is the Sisyphean nature of facilities repair at most American museums. As one emergency repair finishes, another one pops up. After finding the money for one project, museum leaders turn their attention to the next one. All the while, deferred maintenance backlogs grow and efforts to advance museum’s core work remain on the back burner. When it comes to facilities, museums never have the money they need, have few places to go find it, and rarely are in a position to do things proactively.

Where Piquette or Litchfield—or the nearly fifteen thousand other museums in need of major system repairs—will find the money for their many outstanding facilities projects is a question that keeps getting harder to answer. While most Americans might hear “museum” and envision the Smithsonian or The Met, the reality is that American museums are overwhelmingly small, mostly volunteer-run enterprises. If Piquette and Litchfield are in any way outliers, it’s that the museums are actually in a better position than most, not a worse one. 

For example, according to the American Association for State and Local History (where I work part-time leading research projects), as many as 80 percent of history organizations operate on less than $200,000 per year, without the benefit of full-time staff.

As a result, most museums just don’t have the time or expertise required to raise the huge sums needed for facility repairs and upgrades. In fact, many museums don’t have a clear picture of their facilities needs at all. “They don’t even know what they don’t know,” said David Marroni, director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office, “and it makes it hard to prioritize, let alone actually implement projects.”

So, even while the Piquette Plant Museum and Litchfield Historical Society operate with relatively small staffs, they both have far more capacity than most museums for activities like writing grant proposals or developing relationships with donors. But even if every museum did have the resources they needed to effectively fundraise, there fundamentally just isn’t enough money to go around. 

Both the GAO report and many of the museum leaders I spoke with mentioned that major donors typically want to see their money (and their name) go to a new wing or to a program series, not to a roof or an HVAC unit. Museums outside of major cities meanwhile, especially rural and tribal museums, rarely have access to major foundations or wealthy donors capable of supporting capital projects.

Some federal and state grants offer assistance, but they’re likewise beset with challenges. Most require applicants to navigate complex processes to apply, making them largely inaccessible to many small institutions. And, because these grant programs are typically underfunded, they also end up incredibly competitive, supporting only a small number of the proposals they receive. While the Tennessee State Museum, for example, has delivered millions of dollars in state funds for infrastructure projects at museums across the state over the past several years—a rare success story when it comes to funding facility repairs—they regularly receive twice as many proposals as they have the money to fund, according to Ashley Howell, the museum’s director. So, although few other states even have programs like this, those that do still can’t accommodate the museum community’s massive need by themselves.

This already challenging situation has grown worse during President Trump’s second term, as his administration has attempted to gut federal cultural agencies. The National Endowment for the Humanities, for example, once had several ways to fund the types of infrastructure projects museums so badly need, including Challenge Grants, which used federal funds to match donations from the private sector, Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Organizations, and dedicated funding for state humanities councils able to flexibly regrant smaller sums to local institutions. Although these grants were incredibly difficult to secure and not nearly sufficient to fully address museums’ facilities needs, they provided millions of dollars in funding to museums each year.

Nearly all of that has disappeared under the second Trump administration. Last year, DOGE laid off 65 percent of NEH staff and cancelled 97 percent of its grants. While the legality and finality of these decisions are still being contested in the courts, the grants that formerly funded facilities projects have now been consolidated within the Division of Collections and Infrastructure. Facilities projects now will have to compete for less money amid a wider range of proposals, further limiting the options available to museums.

The Ford Piquette Plant Museum was among those whose grants were cancelled last spring. They had been awarded a $500,000 grant to fund its elevator and restroom renovation project, but had only been reimbursed for about $25,000 at the time of cancellation. “That was just such a blow, because that is a once-in-a-lifetime grant,” Jill Woodward told me. “If you have capital problems, where do you go?” In the past, the museum had success with the “Save America’s Treasures” program, which continues to be one of the only federal grant options for these kinds of projects. But, because that program is operated jointly between the National Park Service, NEH, NEA, and IMLS—all four of which are operating under dramatically diminished capacity under the current administration—the continued viability of that program is in doubt.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services, has never funded construction projects through its grant programs, a fact the GAO report was intended to help change. By shedding light on facilities issues, members of Congress hoped to build momentum toward expanding the agency’s remit. But last year, instead of reauthorizing the agency, the Trump administration attempted to shutter it.

At the most basic level, so many museums face such daunting facilities challenges that all of the currently available funding sources are simply not capable of addressing it. Even if federal grant programs are reinstated at 2024 levels, it still wouldn’t be enough. Without a massive new investment, the state of American museums will only grow worse.

While the nation’s 250th anniversary could have sparked a generational investment in the nation’s museum infrastructure, most federal cultural agencies are currently funding the President’s pet projects rather than doling it out to small museums. At NEH, for example, funding has gone to trying to create the “Garden of American Heroes,” a proposed statue garden of 250 notable figures from American history, along with tens of millions of dollars to establish conservative “civics” institutes on university campuses. IMLS funds, meanwhile, have been used to support the White House’s “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums created in partnership with conservative education outfit Prager U. Failing to take advantage of this anniversary to redouble the nation’s investment in museums is a missed opportunity, one unlikely to come around again any time soon.

Speaking with museum leaders about their facilities issues also made clear the hidden costs of underfunding museums. All the time museum staff spend fundraising for facility repairs—writing grant proposals, cultivating donors, scoping out projects that may never even happen—takes time and resources away from things like exhibits, community programs, and other, more mission-oriented activities.

The Litchfield Historical Society owns the nation’s very first law school, for example, a story they’ve been unable to fully focus on because they spend so much time dealing with facilities issues. “The history that is connected to that is beyond what most people can imagine,” Jenkins said. “If I could wave a magic wand to get rid of all my deferred maintenance, that…would set the stage for us to really think about fresh, new interpretation.”

At the Ford Piquette Plant Museum, Jill Woodward has similarly bold ideas, but is stuck spending most of her time fundraising for facilities. The museum currently only uses a fraction of its massive building, and Woodward would like to see the museum reclaim and interpret more of the space. She’d like to create a micro-museum in the building’s old elevator. And she’d like to see the museum expand outside its walls as well, re-establishing the market that used to exist across the street. “In my perfect world, we are able to offer Model-T rides and themed tours of this neighborhood,” Woodward said. “We want to expand our interpretation of Milwaukee Junction outside the four walls of the museum.”

But until something changes, Jenkins, Woodward, and thousands of other museum leaders will have to keep fundraising and keep crossing their fingers their HVAC doesn’t fail.