Slide Show With Instructions for Tagging National Park Exhibits for Removal for Violating Executive Order

I have been posting photos for the last six weeks that Interior Department staff have identified as National Park exhibits being in violation of President Trump’s Executive Order 1453. I appreciate the thousands of you who have viewed the photos. However, I have gotten a few questions about how the Interior staff were informed about this new procedure and how violations were to be reported. I have also been questioned about whether the submitted photos were done for a non-political purpose, like identifying worn out signage or calling for litter removal at public areas. As you will see from the slides, the Interior Department was not asking if there was ordinary maintenance issues. They repeatedly asked about exhibits that violated the new Executive Order on political content.

I have reproduced about 80% of the slides in these two shows. There were several slides that explained reporting tools and forms in a repetitive manner and I have left them out. However, if you want to see all of the slides, you can go to the online sources and download the entire document.

The first slide show is on implementation of the president’s March 2025 Executive Order.

It starts off with the title of the new program which it has adapted from the president’s March 2025 Executive Order: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Nothing in that title about litter removal or replacing panels that show wear and tear. The title tells you that this will be a show about “correcting” the modern historical effort to present information about excluded groups. According to the Executive Order:

“It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”

Next the slide brings up Secretary of the Interior Burgum’s order which said that prior to President Trump’s term “monuments, memorials, statues, markers…have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” Again, this project was not to clean up litter, it was to correct the modern approach to history in which any treatment of Robert E. Lee’s masterful generalship also includes the cause he fought for, the preservation of slavery. Burgum sees the modern historiography as “inappropriately minimize[d] the value of certain…figures… .”

Now the slide show turns to actions that the Interior Department’s staff had to engage in. The NPS “must identify ‘whether any such properties contain images, descriptions, messages, narratives…that inappropriately disparages Americans past or living… .”

The next slide tells the audience that corrections to the central website is reserved to the central office.

Then there is the timeline. There were several additional memos setting new deadlines for submittals of offending signage and materials. Even in the latest spreadsheet that was organized at the end of this process, some National Parks still had not submitted a response.

The next slide talks about reviewing any monuments or exhibits that were removed since January 1, 2020. So, basically it is to examine removals made during the Biden Administration.

Here is the form for reporting information.

If you look at the next slide, it is focused entirely on the politics. Here the National Park Service administrators will decide if the “positive submission” (i.e. old material that was taken down) was changed to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American History” or “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures” or if they were changed to “include any other improper partisan ideology.”

In addition to reviewing what was removed, the parks should review “all public-facing content” to see if the “content” violates the president’s Executive Order.

Next is the “reporting tool” that individual parks must use to report non-compliant materials at the parks.

The next slide tells the staff that a review in Washington will take place and that the decisions will be made in a centralized fashion.

The slide show says that there will be prompt removal of exhibits and signage that does not follow the executive order. However, most of the signage actually removed was removed over the winter, not in September, 2025, in fact most parks had not even reported what they thought might violate the Executive Order until the following Winter.

The next slide instructs staff to place signs around the park encouraging visitors to become informers.

At the end is a promise to make additional guidance available in the future.

Here is another slide show elaborating on the first presentation. This was made available three months after the preceding guidance. It was issued on September 19, 2025. The above slide show had a deadline of July 18, 2025 for report to have been submitted by the parks. In the second slide show it is clear that many had not submitted reports. The first slide show says that parks will be notified by Washington of the appropriate actions to take by August 18, 2025 and that the covering or removal be complete by September 17, 2025. Again, this appears to have not happened at many of the parks or from the Washington office. While there is some new information in this slide show, much is a rehash of the first slide show.

The new slide show makes in clear that apart from signage and exhibits, the parks should review other “media” like videos, as well as books for sale in the parks store.

As in the first slideshow, the parks should not review content on the broad National Park website. After that, though, the parks are responsible for “Retail items available for purchase in outlets operated by park cooperating associations and concessioners.” So , in other words, this calls for a review of the books in the bookstore.