Rolling Back the National Preservation Act Endangers Our Shared History

What does it mean to be an American? Does your family trace its roots to the American Revolution? Did your ancestors come here seeking opportunity, arrive by force and endure enslavement, or live on this land since time immemorial?

As we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, the question of what it means to be American is a tactile one; it is inseparable from the places we inhabit and the histories embedded within them. Places tell us who we are and how we came to be here—as individuals and as a nation.

Yet the Trump administration is working to dismantle legal protections for the historic places that narrate and preserve our nation’s heritage. A federal advisory council, made up of Trump appointees, is working to roll back the National Historic Preservation Act, and in particular Section 106, which requires federal agencies to consider how the projects they carry out and fund may affect historic properties.

If we hope to look back after another 250 years and understand how far we have come, we must leave something on the landscape to see.

This process, as its currently designed, gives consulting parties and the public a voice in helping to identify ways to avoid or minimize adverse effects to our important historical places, whether they be a recently discovered archaeological site, or a famous building. The proposed changes shift that balance by concentrating decision-making authority solely with federal agencies, reducing meaningful consultation with Tribal Nations, state and local governments, preservation experts, and the public.

Making public participation optional and drastically shortening review timelines will give communities, preservation advocates, and the people who live in and care for these places fewer opportunities to raise concerns before important cultural and historic places are altered or lost.

This is a form of cultural and historical erasure and a further erosion of the public trust. While the consequences may not be immediately visible, one potential outcome is the unchallenged destruction of the material evidence of who we are as a nation: evidence of our diversity, the difficult truths of our founding and colonial history, and the struggles and progress that shaped American life.

Once these places are destroyed, the histories embedded within them become more difficult to recover, understand, and tell. Cultural resources are a nonrenewable resource deserving of rigorous protections.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans believe that historically and culturally significant places should be preserved for future generations, according to a June 2026 YouGov poll. And yet, some losses are unfolding in plain sight. The East Wing of the White House was demolished as part of a ballroom project that federal courts later ruled could not proceed without congressional authorization. At the same time, the proposed Trump Arch threatens to alter historically and emotionally significant views between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

And erasure is not always so conspicuous. It can occur when places largely invisible at the national scale are neglected, altered, or removed despite their immense importance to local communities. Booker T. Washington Cemetery in Centreville, Illinois, for example, became overgrown and invisible yet still powerfully meaningful to Black communities in the area, including those with connections to the 1917 East St. Louis violence. In Arizona, construction of the U.S-Mexico border wall recently bulldozed through Las Playas Intaglio, a more than 1,000-year-old Indigenous geoglyph culturally significant to the Tohono-O’odham.

Places like these may be largely unknown to the broader American public, and once they are removed or altered there is no longer that physical interruption in the contemporary landscape. Nothing to catch the eye of someone passing by prompting the question: What happened here?

Our understanding of what it means to be an American is shaped, in part, by the physical evidence of the people who came before us. When historic places disappear, something more than buildings, archaeological sites, or landscapes is lost. Historic places anchor us in space and time. They confront us with histories we might otherwise forget, preserve evidence of both injustice and achievement, and allow us to see change written into the landscape itself.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, protecting these places is not simply an exercise in preserving the past. It is an investment in our ability to understand ourselves and the future. If we hope to look back after another 250 years and understand how far we have come, we must leave something on the landscape to see.

If the proposed changes to the Section 106 process are finalized, losses like these could become more difficult for communities to identify, challenge, or prevent. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s next meeting is November 10, and the proposed revisions are currently moving through the federal rulemaking process. Once the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register, the public will have an opportunity to submit formal comments. You can also contact your members of Congress to make them aware of the proposed changes and your concerns about their potential effects on historic preservation. The bottom line is simple: If you care for our historic places, be their voice.