Republicans didn’t install a Jan. 6 plaque because of a ‘design problem.’ A simple workaround fixed it

A plaque honoring law enforcement for their help on January 6 languished in the Capitol basement for three years before finally being installed this month.

[Photo: Getty Images]

In March 2022, Congress passed a law mandating that, to commemorate the law enforcement officers who responded to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, a plaque needed to be placed on the western front of the Capitol building listing each of the officers’ names. 

The law stipulated that this plaque should be up within a year. As of early 2026, though, the finished plaque was collecting dust in the depths of the Capitol’s basement next to a pile of tools and maintenance equipment. 

For the past three years, the plaque’s future has become caught up in a game of partisan cat and mouse. After leadership in the House shifted to Republicans in 2023, multiple Democrats claimed that House Speaker Mike Johnson purposefully stalled the plaque’s installation. Johnson failed to give the go-ahead for its installation to the Architects of the Capitol, the steward of the Capitol building that was charged by Congress with commissioning and mounting the plaque. These delays continued for so long that two of the officers involved in the attack, Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, sued the Architects of the Capitol last summer.

Finally, on March 7, the plaque went up—albeit inside a hallway without public access—and it was all thanks to one clever design add-on: a tiny QR code.

A commemorative plaque gets caught in design drama

Before the plaque finally made its way to the Capitol, most Democrats who spoke on the matter were of the mind that Republican leaders were strategically delaying its display as much as possible. Oddly enough, Johnson tried to refute these claims by shifting the blame onto the plaque’s actual design.

Back in May 2025, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a news conference that the reason for the delay was that Republicans, “directed by their puppet master Donald Trump, have been told, ‘Try to erase January 6 as if it has never happened.’” But in an interview with PBS on January 6, a spokesperson for Johnson said that the plaque could not go up “because of logistics,” claiming that they had not found a way to fit the 3,000 officers’ names onto the plaque. 

Presumably, Johnson’s team was referring to the original language of the March 2022 law, which stated that the Architect of the Capitol’s plaque needed to list the names of “all of the officers of the United States Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies and protective entities who responded to the violence that occurred at the United States Capitol.” This constraint, they appeared to argue, made the project “not implementable.”

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