July 25, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.
But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”
The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.
Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.
A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.
Kennicott also calls out the administration’s proposed major rule change in the National Historical Preservation Act (NHPA). Trump installed a loyalist as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. On Friday, July 17, the chair proposed dramatic revisions to Section 106 of the NHPA. This is the section of the 60-year-old law that requires federal agencies to “take into account” what their actions will do to historic properties and places. This is the requirement that gives the public, as well as local, state, and tribal governments, a voice in the changes to historic and cultural sites.
Brent Leggs is the chief executive officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded, nonprofit organization founded by Congress in 1949 to support historic preservation. He warned that “[t]he ACHP’s proposed changes to Section 106 will eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States. If [they are] implemented, federal agencies will no longer be required to avoid or minimize damage to our nation’s historic sites and landscapes, or seek public input on federal projects that would impact historic places.”
Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. Werkheiser told Treisman: “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.”
According to Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Joe Biden—the current chair is an “acting” official—the rule changes would also remove from historical protection “significant cultural landscape features” like the Grand Canyon. Supporters of the change say it would help “agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects.” Highways, for example, which in the past have leveled entire neighborhoods as well as burial sites, would no longer require review.
Revising Section 106 would smooth two projects important to the administration.
The administration wants to open a ten-mile buffer zone barring mineral, oil, and gas extraction around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to development. The area “is a vibrant place of prayer, pilgrimage and core to the identity of many Southwest tribes, whose connection to this land stretches back thousands of years,” Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, told reporters on Wednesday. Deb Haaland, who served as Biden’s secretary of the interior and is a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, notes that Chaco Canyon has been recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as a site of universal importance and that the buffer land holds more than 4,700 known archeological sites.
Cochiti Pueblo governor Phillip Quintana called the area “one of the most important Indigenous cultural landscapes in North America, a place whose meaning reaches far beyond any single administration.”
Last November, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Representatives Vasquez, Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asking him to protect the cultural landscape around Chaco Canyon.
They noted that “under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), you are legally required to ensure that you consider how your actions will affect historic properties, which also requires consulting with each relevant Tribal government. These steps must be taken before pursuing your proposed action.”
The revisions to Section 106 would remove that requirement.
Bronin noted that the changes to Section 106 would also fast-track the triumphal arch Trump wants to build at Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery.
On June 15, Senator Angus King (I-ME), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Parks; Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Natural Resources; Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and Representatives Maxine Dexter (D-OR) and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) responded to a Section 106 assessment with a letter to Secretary Burgum.
The lawmakers noted that they were the ranking members in the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the construction of monuments in Washington, D.C. “We oppose this project in the strongest terms,” they wrote. They called out the Section 106 process as “fall[ing] short of the law.” Among other things, they noted that the comment process for the new project had been only ten days and that the proposed arch would “deface one of the most deliberate and historic sightlines in America.”
They wrote that proceeding with the project would break at least three laws, and warned that officials moving forward with it “would be answerable as individuals” and face penalties up to and including criminal fines and imprisonment.
“Every official who directs this work, and every firm that performs it,” they wrote, “proceeds at their own peril.” “This project is stone-cold illegal,” King told Luke Broadwater of the New York Times. “It is one of the clearest legal cases I’ve seen in more than 50 years of being a lawyer.”
But now, at least some of those legal concerns might go away. Treisman said the revision of Section 106 would mean that the near-constant noise from the arch’s construction would not be weighed as a consideration in its construction, and the arch’s destruction of the historic views built into the capital from its inception would not be considered either.
What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.