The Trump administration’s campaign to remove National Park Service exhibits that “inappropriately disparage” historical figures is bogged down more than nine months after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum set it in motion.
The sheer volume of park signs, panels and museum exhibits flagged by park rangers because they mentioned topics like slavery, climate change or violence against Native Americans overwhelmed the Trump administration from the beginning, said three people familiar with the process used to evaluate potential changes, granted anonymity because they feared retribution.
“They bit off way more than they could chew,” one of those people said.
But even as parks rushed to meet Interior deadlines, NPS last year dissolved in just a few months a team of experts created to decide if the material flagged by parks had violated President Donald Trump’s prohibition on excessively “negative” portrayals of U.S. history, said two of the people familiar with the process. One person said they stopped meeting in early August.
Many park personnel on the ground now are unsure if NPS will soon demand changes at many parks or leave things as they are, said a park superintendent, who was granted anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to the media.
The effort has reached a “nebulous” phase, the superintendent said, with some parks moving forward with edits and others still waiting for changes to be approved.
While some exhibits have been altered or removed — most dramatically when NPS in January abruptly took down an exhibit about former President George Washington’s slaves at a Philadelphia site — the vast majority of parks have blown past several Interior Department deadlines to remove material or put up new content, said the superintendent and one of the people familiar with the internal NPS process.
Elizabeth Peace, an Interior Department spokesperson, did not answer questions about who at Interior is making decisions on the flagged materials and whether more would be changed. When asked about the review team, she said that “the characterization that the review effort was ‘disbanded’ is incorrect.”
“Parks conducted initial assessments at the local level in collaboration with tribes and community partners where needed, and elevated questions to the Department where appropriate,” Peace said in a statement. “The Department provided feedback, and where updates were warranted, edits were made consistent with professional standards and consultation requirements.”
The scope of potential changes is large. After Burgum last May ordered national parks to eradicate content that failed to properly celebrate social progress over U.S. history or the “grandeur of the American landscape,” staffers at parks across the country sent images of scores of exhibits to headquarters for evaluation by agency higher-ups. An internal NPS spreadsheetobtained by POLITICO’s E&E News shows the breadth of the material flagged by parks, including more than 600 entries.
If the administration follows through on even a portion of those entries, it could eliminate from national parks stories about essential — and disturbing — parts of this country’s past, from slavery to the treatment of Native Americans. That threatens to wipe away decades of work by NPS to tell a more comprehensive version of America’s history.
Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources with the National Parks Conservation Association, which has sued NPS over its move to change the presentation of history at parks, said he sees the Trump administration’s agenda as itself a potential replay of the past.
After the Civil War, many white Southerners recast the war as an honorable fight for state sovereignty, downplaying how its leaders broke from the union to uphold human slavery.
“That [revisionist history] helped to elevate the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative, which I think held the door open for 50 years of the worst racial violence — Jim Crow, segregation, lynching,” Spears said. “If we’re headed in that direction, we are in trouble.”
But the administration and its supporters have countered that they are combating a revisionist trend that dwells too much on the worst parts of history and not enough on what Burgum called the country’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
Peace has said that park displays that “focus solely on challenging aspects of U.S. history, without acknowledging broader context or national progress, may unintentionally provide an incomplete understanding rather than enrich it.”
A top-down process
Problems with implementing the Trump administration’s overhaul emerged early on at the park service.
Trump kicked off the effort last March, with an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” After Burgum in May told parks to implement the president’s order, the park service established a review team of about six or seven NPS specialists in history and interpretation to oversee any potential changes, said two of the people familiar with the early planning.
Expecting that parks would overreport items — out of fear or simply because the directives in Burgum’s order were so broad — the team planned to work through submissions in small batches, giving careful assessment to each flagged material, one of the people familiar explained.
Disagreements quickly surfaced. In a June 3 meeting with NPS and Interior staff, then-acting Interior solicitor Greg Zerzan gave examples of things that he viewed as unnecessary editorializing, such as a sign at Great Smoky Mountains National Park that he said implicated the coal industry for creating haze in the mountains, according to the two people who were familiar with the meeting.
“They were already, like, this one has to go. This is terrible,” one person said of the Trump officials in the meeting.
The solicitor stressed that the administration didn’t want to change factual history. But for some members of the team, the administration’s approach appeared “ideological,” one of the people familiar said.
In another instance, some NPS staff on the review team had asked how to apply Burgum’s order to not “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” when explaining the unjust incarceration of Japanese American families during World War II. NPS operates historic sites at several former internment camps, such as the Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho and Tule Lake National Monument in California.
Zerzan, who currently serves as general counsel at the U.S. Department of Transportation, responded that parks can also focus on how Japanese Americans were heroes in the U.S. war effort in order to draw attention to uplifting narratives while also portraying the stark reality of internment.
The Transportation Department directed a request for comment about Zerzan’s statements to Interior.
Peace did not respond to questions about the statements, but said that the agency has not mandated “changes or removal” of signs at Japanese internment camp sites.
One of the challenges of the review process has been limited written instructions. NPS staffers on the review committee pressed Trump officials for better guidance, but they were initially told they had enough information just from the language in Burgum’s order, according to the two people familiar with the process.
The NPS review team gradually dissolved after a few months, two of the people familiar said. Acting Director Jessica Bowron, the agency’s longtime comptroller, began to take on more of the responsibility of approving or disproving contents’ compliance with the Burgum order, one of the people said.
In late 2025, parks were required to submit action plans on how to approach removals, edits and replacements of materials that had been deemed out of compliance. Those plans would be vetted by NPS leadership and then by Interior leaders, according to the superintendent and one of the people familiar with the planning.
The most recent deadline for action passed Jan. 16, when parks that had action plans approved were to begin implementing them, according to a park superintendent. The removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House site in Philadelphia occurred one week later and was prompted by a direct order from Bowron, who contacted the Independence National Historic Park’s superintendent, according to a court deposition.
The park superintendent said they were unsure of why the Philadelphia removals happened so suddenly and publicly — their impression had been that Interior didn’t want parks to take displays down until replacement materials were ready.
New panels weren’t available in January for the President’s House site, leaving exhibit sites bare for weeks, although last month Interior said they had new exhibits in hand.
Changes are now on hold as a federal legal case plays out. The previous exhibit has been partially restored, as ordered last month by the federal judge before an appellate court intervened.
Independence was already a park that had been singled out by the Trump administration. The park was called out by name in Trump’s original executive order and is expected to be a backdrop for the president’s celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday this year.
Some critics say the current NPS process has been the opposite of the typical NPS consensus-building approach.
“This is exactly the antithesis to the way that the park service does their history,” said Spears. “[Parks] put together panels, they talk to experts, they talk to community members and descendants, and then they figure out, after, like, six months or 18 months, what should go in.”
‘Dark vision of America’
Congressional Democrats have lambasted NPS’s review, taking particular aim at the decision to target an exhibit about slavery and the first president.
“They want to hide behind an executive order about not disparaging Americans, as if telling the truth about slavery is some kind of insult, rather than a basic duty of a democratic society,” said Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) at a recent hearing.
The Trump administration’s approach has its defenders, however, who say NPS and other public institutions had begun to focus too much on racism or sexism in the past. They point to Muir Woods National Monument outside San Francisco, where in 2021, NPS staff annotated signs with “sticky notes” to include history about women and Native Americans and to point out the racist language that conservationist John Muir used in his writings.
Rep. Addison McDowell, a North Carolina Republican, said at the recent committee hearing that Democrats were depicting a “deeply misguided and dark vision of America.”
“I’ll be the first one to say it. We are not a perfect nation. But let’s also be clear on this, we are not defined by our imperfection,” McDowell said at the hearing.
The debate has at times been hampered by a lack of clarity over what has changed at parks. NPS hasn’t comprehensively disclosed where it is making changes, and most evidence of updated or removed content has come from local media reports.
Last month, Muir Woods replaced a panel about climate change and redwoods with another about the giant trees. Over the summer, the monument also removed the sticky-note exhibit. Grand Teton National Park recently took down a sign that noted an explorer featured in the visitor’s center took part in a massacre of Piegan Blackfeet women, children and elders, and that he later boasted about his actions, according to the Jackson Hole News & Guide.
The absence of an official account of what’s being changed has also at times amplified public confusion about NPS’s review of historical content, such as when staff at a national monument in Georgia were told by NPS leaders last year that a Civil War-era photo showing the scars created by whipping on a formerly enslaved man’s back violated the secretary’s order. NPS never publicly explained its decision-making process in regard to the image, and Interior officials swiftly denied they had ordered the image removed. After widespread public outcry, the photo has remained in place.
Another controversy emerged last month at a national monument honoring Medgar Evers when a Mississippi website reported the removal of brochures describing the killer of the Civil Rights leader as belonging to the “racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.” Black leaders spoke in defense of the language, including the son of Martin Luther King Jr. The park’s superintendent denied brochures had been removed.
The Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument had flagged its written material for review, according to the internal spreadsheet. But that entry does not detail what could be problematic or if the park had been ordered to make changes.
Peace, the Interior spokesperson, said media reports have created confusion about what is happening at NPS, emphasizing that not all items that have been flagged for consideration will come down.
“Conflating ‘flagged for review’ with ‘mandated for removal’ misrepresents the process,” she said. “Some materials referenced in recent reporting were removed because they were outdated, damaged, or factually inaccurate as part of routine maintenance.”
But many NPS staff are frustrated or angry about both the demand for changes and the lack of clarity, said one park ranger in the West, who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
“It’s brutal,” the ranger said. “This is precisely the opposite of what we swore an oath to do.”
One of the people familiar with the NPS review process noted it appears to be snarled by current staff limitations at the agency. There are many senior leadership vacancies or jobs filled by people in acting positions who also have their permanent job responsibilities to manage, a problem that was exacerbated by early retirement and buyout offers pushed by the Trump administration last year. NPS overall lost a quarter of its permanent staff between 2024 and 2025, according to NPCA data.
The park service’s signage and printing division in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, is one key example of the staffing shortages. That center is responsible for creating the signs and brochures found in many parks, so it would play a key part in any effort to replace exhibits. The staffing level is currently at about 60 employees, down from highs of around 100 people more than a decade ago, according to the person familiar with the review.
‘Horrid conditions’
The internal spreadsheet of flagged exhibits suggests parks have sought Interior direction on some of the most difficult and complicated stories that park sites have to tell. There is, for example, Florida’s Kingsley Plantation — a cotton and sugar plantation run by a family headed by a white merchant and his African wife who herself was formerly enslaved — at the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve.
Park staff noted displaying images of “torture” of enslaved Black women and the “horrid conditions” endured by enslaved Africans during the brutal Middle Passage journey to the Americas.
“Much of what you’ll discover here is challenging,” states an audio tour for the park that’s available online. “Yet we honor those who lived before us by remembering the past as accurately as the records will allow.”
In several instances, the spreadsheet shows park employees pushed back on making changes.
The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana, where a new visitors center is under construction, flagged a panel that said government and Christian-run boarding schools for Native American children “violently erased” culture. The park said that language was specifically agreed upon during tribal consultation and cited an Interior Department investigative report completed in 2024, during the Biden administration, as proof that its language is accurate.
Earlier this month, the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council in Montana unanimously passed a resolutionopposing changes to the visitors center that the tribe had helped curate.
“This attempt to change or remove tribal markers and monuments dims the light of the healing and progress we have all made,” said Northern Cheyenne Vice President Ernest Littlemouth in a statement.
