President Donald Trump is targeting American history itself in a new push that looks less like patriotism and more like political control.
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Trump is specifically targeting the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, or ACHP, which The New Republic’s Timothy Noah warns is at work trying to destroy historic preservation of national sites and even Native American tribes.
ACHP regulators deal specifically with of the , which requires federal agencies to consider how their projects might affect historic places before proceeding. So, if a project could damage or change a historic building, site or landmark, the ACHP steps in and works on ways to reduce harm. Trump, by contrast, wants to make huge changes that forever damage or eliminate historic landmarks, such as his bulldozing of the White House itself.
In his report, Noah said that Trump’s ACHP is “reviewing” Section 106. The process of “reviewing” it is further along than Noah said he fully realized.
“Now the ACHP, which is under the firm control of President Donald Trump, has produced a draft notice of proposed rulemaking (text here and here) that would make it significantly easier for Trump ‘to fast-track projects that destroy, or cause irreversible damage to, our historic places, with virtually no public oversight,’ according to Sara Bronin, who chaired the ACHP under President Joe Biden. The ACHP is expected to publish the notice of proposed rulemaking by the end of this week,” Noah wrote.
So far, Trump’s plans have involved things like erecting his Arc de Trump, blocking Arlington National Cemetery and building the National Garden of American Heroes in West Potomac Park. However, projects like the East Wing prove he’s fully prepared to take a wrecking ball to some of the most important public land in the United States.
“These regulatory changes would be like handing a box of matches to an arsonist,” wrote Noah.
Greg Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, told Noah, “We’ve never seen a proposal that would do this much damage to this much of the country’s history in one stroke.”
His group is currently dealing with litigation over Trump’s Kennedy Center overhaul, and Trump’s idea to whitewash the grey Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
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“Cultural Heritage Partners has set up an online war room to fight against the proposed Section 106 changes,” Noah reported.
Bronin said, “I would encourage people not to get distracted by the types of projects that have been in the news, because these changes are geared toward a more systematic overhaul of the process” to “benefit some of the most destructive projects that are in the federal pipeline.”
She explained that it isn’t merely about building statues of himself in Washington; it’s also about oil and mining operations in national parks protected by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
One case dates back to an effort by former GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, who slipped in a provision into a 2014 defense bill that moved an area of Arizona’s Tonto National Forest from ownership of the local indigenous community to an Australian mining company called Resolution Copper. The mining operation would “obliterate” the native community. The one thing standing in its way has been Section 106. However, the use of the term “geographically compact” is now preventing the land from being protected because it’s so expansive.
Noah also said that the text claims “noncompact, unimproved natural features such as mountains, valleys, bodies of water or landscapes, including ethnographic landscapes, do not qualify as property for the purposes of section 106.”
It will likely grant Trump the license to dismantle the entire Oak Flat area, known as Chi’chil Biłdagoteel.
“These two words,” Bronin warned, “would greenlight a wave of destruction of our historic and culturally significant properties that we’ve never seen before.”
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