“I didn’t realize that it relies on private donations. This seems like a legitimate use of taxpayers’ money. We should be able to afford safekeeping our artifacts.”
Admission to the Smithsonian is currently free. How about charging admission to the Smithsonian to help offset some of the cost? In an age when a day at Disney World costs $100 per head, the entrance fee per person at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is $25, and a day at the Louvre costs $16.25 a modest $5.00 per person charge seems reasonable to raise $140 million per year toward the $850 million the Smithsonian requested from Congress for 2015.
Isn't the Smithsonian federally funded? Good question! Federal appropriations provide the foundation of the Smithsonian's operating budget and support core functions, such as building operations and maintenance, research, and safeguarding the collections. Projects like Reboot the Suit aren’t covered by our federal appropriations, which means we can only undertake them if we can fund them some other way. In other words, we won’t be able to do this project without the participation of Kickstarter backers.
That’s probably not a bad idea. There would be something unfortunate about paying a fee to attend our museum, though.