National park staffers used to control park websites. But not anymore.
A small group of Interior Department employees has been reviewing new submissions for National Park Service websites since February, in part evaluating the material for compliance with President Donald Trump’s 2025 mandate to present a more positive history of the country at its many historic sites, battlefields and natural wonders.
One review considered an article by a tribal group for a website about the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. By the time the article was posted, it was scrubbed of references to former President Thomas Jefferson fathering children with an enslaved young woman.
For NPS personnel, the loss of online authority is a big cultural shift for an agency where park staff typically led on portraying information about their sites, often in consultation with local communities and Native American tribes.
“The Park Service has been for most — if not almost all — of its history very decentralized, with a lot of authority, including comms at the park level,” said Jonathan Jarvis, who led NPS during the Obama administration. “This is a very divergent approach.”
Any substantive changes or new materials on NPS websites must be vetted and managed by the digital team, a group of staffers consolidated from across Interior offices and agencies that answers directly to leaders in Washington, according to guidance viewed by POLITICO’s E&E News and two employees familiar with the process.
Snapshots from a database of requests for website changes made by park staffers in March, also viewed by E&E News, show the kind of submissions from parks they are considering.
Part of the agenda: Looking at material to determine if it fits Trump’s order from last year that exhibits at national parks and other public lands shouldn’t dwell on the “negative” aspects of U.S. history or “inappropriate disparage” historical figures.
One NPS employee described the new process as a “total lockdown” on information — part of a larger effort at Interior to restrict who can communicate with the public and what gets said.
E&E News spoke with two NPS staffers, one Interior Department employee and a former Interior employee who were all familiar with the agency’s response to the Trump administration’s effort to review park materials. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
It’s unclear how expansive the new review process, which became official in February, will be. A substantial overhaul of NPS websites would be a daunting task, given the 180,000 webpages maintained by parks, including archives of images, educational videos, historical research by park historians and articles written by outside groups but hosted on government sites.
The Interior staff member said before the recent changes, more than 1,000 park staffers had the ability to change website content.
Interior did not answer questions about the online changes, including whether the Trump administration’s history review will be widely applied to webpages and how many Interior employees have web editing authority over NPS websites. Asked for comment for this story, the department’s press office reshared a statement from February stating that park content reviewed by NPS and Interior would not necessarily be revised or removed.
Officials have recently defended the stricter communications rules.
Interior Communications Director Katie Martin told the news website SFGate in February that the department revised rules for park communications staff “to ensure clarity, consistency and accountability in how information is shared with the public.”
“This is about establishing clear lines of responsibility, not restricting speech or adding new layers of approval,” Martin told the website. “The goal is effective communication, not control.”
A new level of review
The president and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum launched the history review at national parks and other public lands last year, saying exhibits and visitor center displays should focus on the progress in U.S. history and the country’s physical beauty.
Following the orders by Trump and Burgum, national parks flagged hundreds of exhibits, panels and other physical installations that potentially didn’t comply. So far, NPS has made several changes across the country, altering exhibits on slavery, the cruel treatment of Native Americans and climate change.
The history review was initially intended to include NPS-run websites, according to an internal fact sheet uploaded last year to the park service’s internal server and viewed by E&E News. Content from park museums is often also viewable online, providing additional information.
But that broad online assessment hasn’t openly happened, said two NPS employees and one Interior employee familiar with the review of park materials.
One of the Interior employees familiar with last year’s planning for the review said officials had been cautious about web editing. Officials didn’t want a repeat of the haphazard elimination of references to transgender people from NPS websites that occurred early in the Trump administration and attracted significant media attention, they said.
“The idea was, let’s just slow everybody [down],” the employee said about the online review for historic content. “Then, hopefully, when a request for a website update comes down, it’s carefully thought out.”
To some, NPS has been in need of a shift in historical perspective, saying the information presented by parks has become too focused on chastising American leaders of the past for ills like slavery and violence against Native American tribes.
“There’s a pretty radical difference between how our history is being portrayed, [from] even just a decade or two ago,” said Jeffrey Anderson, founder of the conservative think tank the American Main Street Initiative and a frequent writer on sociopolitical issues at the Claremont Institute’s Review of Books.
“This is an effort by the Trump administration, or the park service under the Trump administration, to try to get back to a more even-handed telling of American history,” he said.
Others say it is reversing progress NPS made in recent decades, starting to explore the difficult episodes in U.S. history. A slavery exhibit at the former presidential home in Philadelphia that the park service took down in the wake of the Trump history order was the result of more than a decade of work by Black historians and local activists urging NPS to add a display exploring the lives of the enslaved during the founding moments of the country.
“The quickest way that you can disappear people is to disappear their story or to soften it,” said Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, during a tense congressional hearing in February that discussed the Philadelphia exhibit. “That’s exactly what’s happening here.”
Sacagawea to Sally Hemings
The internal NPS review database from March shows the kind of historical material now under a microscope.
In one case, park rangers at the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail sought approval to post an article about the origins of Sacagawea, the Native American woman who served as a guide for the explorers’ expedition to the Pacific Ocean. The article was written by the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s Sacagawea Project Board and cleared for publication by park leaders, according to the edit request.
The version eventually posted online, and last updated in April, appears to reflect changes proposed in the editing process that taps Interior’s digital team, including the redaction of a section that compared the difficulty of revising Sacagawea’s historical record to correcting the legacy of Jefferson. The former president ordered the famous Lewis and Clark expedition where Sacagawea served as a guide. He is often portrayed as a champion of liberty despite owning slaves and fathering children with an enslaved young woman, the tribal board wrote.
Jefferson’s past was only fully revealed “after two centuries of struggle by his Black Descendants to expose the truth,” the original article said. That language was not included in what ended up posted, nor was a section calling for multiple viewpoints to uncover the truth of the past.
When asked, Interior did not explain why the passages in the original article weren’t included.
Jefferson enthusiasts bitterly disputed that he fathered Sally Hemings’ children for centuries. In 1998, a DNA study confirmed that a man in the Jefferson family fathered Eston Hemings, Sally’s son. After a 2000 report commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the group said there was a “high probability” that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ six children. Hemings had her first child when she was between 14 and 16 years old.
In another case, park rangers at Sitka National Historical Park requested the removal of online virtual tours related to the Russian Bishop’s House, a 1840s-era home associated with the Russian Orthodox Church, from when Russian was the colonial power in what is now Alaska. The videos included panels on the first floor that had been “flagged for edits/removals” as part of the Trump administration’s review, according to the edit request.
The specific panels of concern within the tour were not detailed. But a separate spreadsheet of flagged content under the historical review identified several exhibits as “needs replacing,” including a panel on the first floor of the Bishop’s House that notes the “forced relocation” of Alaska Natives by Russians and, later, the American government. However, the virtual house tour, in which the panel is visible, was still online at the time of this publication.
Interior has previously emphasized that materials reviewed at parks wouldn’t necessarily be removed. When asked about NPS reviews of materials at parks, Interior has said staffers did initial reviews related to the Trump administration’s orders, at times collaborating with Native American tribes and local communities. Parks then “elevated questions” to Interior officials “where appropriate.”
“The Department provided feedback, and where updates were warranted, edits were made consistent with professional standards and consultation requirements,” Interior said in a February statement.
In some cases, the internal database of online edit requests suggests Interior web staff are overloaded.
The Stones River National Battlefield requested permission to complete its “Stories of Service and Sacrifice” initiative. That’s an online repository of 250 stories of the Civil War soldiers buried at the Tennessee site to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The park had already published 129 stories as of March, and staffers said they worried about damage to the park’s reputation if they stopped midproject, according to the park’s editing request.
But shifting the rest of the project to Interior staff would “significantly increase their burden at a time when resources are understandably constrained,” park’s staff wrote, offering to continue posting the stories themselves. At the time this story was published, the battlefield had posted 171 soldier stories.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct Jeffrey Anderson’s name and job title.
