The National Park Service Is Removing Signs Staff Reported as ‘Factually Accurate’

National Park Service staff have been on the frontline of the Trump administration’s war against “ideological indoctrination,” flagging hundreds of signs, merchandise and presentations to the administration for possible removal.

A NOTUS review of the database of material under evaluation found that in many instances, park staff acknowledged the factual validity of the information they were reporting.

“While these statements are historically accurate and supported by firsthand accounts, they may be perceived as disparaging by individuals who are less familiar with the history of the Civil Rights Movement,” staff at the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail wrote in at least 15 reports flagging exhibits at the site.

Sign Up for NOTUS’ Free Daily Newsletter

The reports were recently published online by an anonymous federal government employee and first reported this week by the Washington Post. The database offers an inside look at the types of information being targeted in the Trump administration’s crackdown on content that it has deemed “partisan” or “disparaging” at national parks, monuments and other sites.

The administration’s removals to date have included stripping information about climate change, slavery, the civil rights movement, and the mistreatment of Native Americans from national park sites, according to court filings from the National Parks Conservation Association. NPCA sued the Interior Department this month over its decision to remove content from park sites.

The organization said in the suit that the content removals “erase the history of countless people and communities from public spaces” and “limit the availability of scientific information relevant to ensuring the long-term preservation of the parks themselves.”

All the reports from agency staff were made between June 10 and Sept. 18 last year, according to the database. The audit was the result of President Trump’s March 2025 executive order directing the Interior Department to ensure that materials at national park sites focused on American “achievements and progress” and the “grandeur of the American landscape” rather than on topics that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

A slide deck presented to National Park Service superintendents in June, which was included with the other anonymously published materials, offered instructions on using an online system to flag content that could be out of line with that executive order. The slide deck said that National Park Service leadership would review all flagged content and advise staff at each park on whether to remove or change it by Aug. 18, 2025.

“All inappropriate content” at National Park Service sites should be “removed or covered” by Sept. 17, the slide deck said.

But the removals appear to be an ongoing process, and multiple signs were removed after the September deadline, according to a tracker by Save Our Signs, a citizen-led effort to chronicle the information that’s disappearing from park sites.

The Interior Department has skirted reporters’ questions about exactly how much content it’s removing or altering across National Park Service sites.

Molly Blake, a team member at Save Our Signs and a social sciences librarian at the University of Minnesota, told NOTUS the group has tracked hundreds of signs, displays and other material that the administration has removed since Trump issued the executive order.

“The spreadsheet shows that the message that was sent is that we can’t talk about times in American history where people in power hurt other people. We can’t talk about times in American history where people’s civil rights were violated,” Blake said. “And that’s a really killing and disturbing development.”

The National Park Service did not answer detailed questions from NOTUS about whether it is still accepting and reviewing reports of content from park service employees, the process it uses to review those reports or how many pieces of information it has removed to date.

A National Park Service spokesperson said in a statement that “the narrative being advanced is false and these draft, deliberative internal documents are not a representation of final action taken by the Department.”

“We are aware that internal working documents were edited before being inappropriately and illegally released to the media in ways that misrepresented the status of this effort,” the spokesperson said. “Employees who altered internal records and leaked in an effort the hurt the Trump administration will be held accountable.”

Current National Park Service employees confirmed to the Washington Post that the database was authentic.

Park staff also deemed other information accurate but flagged it as possibly in violation of Trump’s executive order, including an exhibit at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park that explores how people from different backgrounds can interpret archaeology in different ways.

“Factually accurite [sic], but submitting for review out of an abundance of caution,” the report said.

Another report from someone at the park service’s Washington office said a junior ranger booklet that mentions how Native American people were removed during development of the Transcontinental Railroad was “factually accurate,” but flagged it for “content that may conflict with” the executive order.

A third report, also from someone at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, flagged an exhibit about an early American family that lived near the nation’s capital. “This information is factual,” the report said, “but does highlight the fact that the success of the Cloud families [sic] economic interests relied on enslaved labor. We just want to ensure that this is an appropriate way to tell this story.”

In a report of a sign about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair at the FDR Memorial in Washington, a staff member wrote, “I recommend keeping it, but am concerned that it may be seen by some as disparagement.”

The list could go on.

In at least one report, a park service employee suggested the administration review a sign and possibly change it even though they acknowledged changes could run afoul of legal requirements.

“Text addresses slavery as the primary cause of the American Civil War,” the report from a staff member at Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee said. “This is both historically correct and legislatively mandated but we ask for further review to confirm it is aligned with SO 3431.”

It’s unclear whether the Interior Department and National Park Service reviewed each of the content reports included in the database. But at least some of the materials flagged through the online system have since been removed.

Confirmed removals that line up with information reported by employees include series of signs at Acadia National Park, a sign at a water-bottle filling station at Fort Sumter National Monument encouraging visitors to use reusable water bottles instead of single-use plastics, and an exhibit at Rock Creek Park in Washington that discussed racist views held by former Sen. Francis G. Newlands.

“We understand a lot of folks are responding under duress, and I think that kind of comes out of some of the comments that have been leaked,” Blake said. “What I think is also just especially insidious is there’s no clear shared understanding of what it means to be quote-unquote ‘disparaging or inappropriate.’ And so then you get into these absurd situations where you’re reporting things that are historically accurate.”

Most reports in the database flag historical context about slavery, the removal of Indigenous tribes, wars and more. Some go so far as to ask the administration to review basic scientific facts.

For instance, an employee at the Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia asked the administration to review a series of signs at the visitor center because they contained a “drawing of a deer pooping,” information on how deer are a common host for ticks that carry diseases and a sentence about how cicadas make loud noises. That material “contains content that may conflict with SO 3431 or EO 14253,” the person who submitted the report said in their filing, though they acknowledged in a note that the information was “true.”