This summer, national park employees and visitors were asked to do something highly unusual: report any signs that failed to make America look great. The effort, stemming from an executive order from President Donald Trump, has already resulted in the removal of signs about the horrors of slavery, massacres of Indigenous peoples, and the threat of climate change, even on lands directly in harm’s way.
Consider Acadia National Park in Maine. More intense storms and rising seas are accelerating erosion and killing native plants along its iconic coastline. Warmer temperatures are assisting the spread of an invasive insect that totally wiped out the park’s red pines. And yet earlier this month, park employees removed multiple signs explaining how climate change was contributing to these changes.
“Getting access to that information when you’re right there is a way to see with your own eyes what is going on,” said Chellie Pingree, a Democratic representative from Maine. The removed signs didn’t just educate visitors about environmental problems — they also outlined steps visitors could take to reduce their carbon emissions, such as taking a shuttle bus instead of a personal vehicle to visit popular park sites.
Trump’s executive order in March directed the Interior Department to remove descriptions that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” and focus instead on “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” The directive also demanded an emphasis on “the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” Even items at national park gift shops were subject to review.
Win McNamee / Getty Images
This isn’t the first obstacle the Park Service has endured under Trump’s second term. Due to federal cuts, the National Park Service has lost a quarter of its permanent staff, many of whom worked to preserve species and natural features in the parks over the long term. Employees at Acadia are stretched very thin, with more than 60 vacant year-round staff positions, according to Todd Martin, senior program manager for the Northeast for the National Parks Conservation Association. The administration has also proposed cutting the Park Service’s budget for 2026 by $1.2 billion.
Gutting those resources, particularly at a time when climate change is altering national parks, means that the very beauty Trump wants to highlight is at risk of disappearing.
National parks have warmed at double the rate of the rest of the country, according to research from Patrick Gonzalez, formerly the principal climate change scientist at the National Park Service. “More severe heating occurs in national parks because extensive areas of the national park system are located in extreme environments — in the Arctic, at high elevations, and in the arid Southwest,” he said.
Some of the parks’ namesake features could be lost: the glaciers of Montana’s Glacier National Park could vanish within decades, the Joshua trees could eventually disappear at California’s Joshua Tree National Park, and more severe wildfires have already taken out a fifth of California’s famous sequoias. Warming temperatures could hurt Yellowstone National Park’s bison population, and sea level rise is reducing habitat for the Florida panther in the Everglades.
“We as a country worry about losing these spectacular resources, and people want to know what the Park Service is doing to keep them alive and to make sure they survive past this generation,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association. “Hiding this information from the public is just not what the Park Service is about.”
Some signs explaining environmental threats came out of the Park Service’s climate change response strategy created under President Barack Obama in 2010, which placed a focus on communicating the risks of global warming — and what could be done about it — to the public. The interpretive signs were carefully vetted by scientists and other experts to ensure they were accurate before they went up, according to Gonzalez.
It’s unclear how many of these signs will be removed as a result of Trump’s executive order, but many have been brought to the administration’s attention. Park officials at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, flagged a plaque explaining how fossil fuels cause air pollution that harms plants and animals. At Everglades National Park, an employee noted that signs about farming and urban development damaging the land “could be conceived as being disparaging to the development of industrial America.” Meanwhile, at Cape Hatteras National Seashore on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, an employee wondered if a sign about sea level rise threatening the Ocracoke ponies’ habitat “reduces the focus on grandeur, beauty, and abundance.”
Other environmental information has already disappeared from park signs. In July, Muir Woods National Monument in Northern California removed its “history under construction” exhibit that had added historical and cultural context to its existing signage. The new information had included explanations of how the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples maintained the land for centuries through cultural burns, as well as informing visitors that the conservationist Gifford Pinchot, who worked to preserve Muir Woods, also promoted eugenics.
Jace Ritchey / National Park Service
Park Service staff have told Brengel that being asked to report and censor their own signs has been a morale killer. “They’re devastated,” she said. She’s heard that some parks have been told not to remove any more signs because of “bad publicity,” but also that many parks west of the Mississippi have been told to keep flagging signs to comply with the directive.
“This is not over,” Brengel said. “They’re planning to censor more parks. It’s just a matter of time at this point.”
None of the national parks Grist contacted commented on the environment-related signs that were removed or flagged for review, deferring to the Department of Interior or the National Park Service. (National parks employees have been told not to talk to journalists, sources told Grist.)
“Thanks to President Donald Trump, Interior is ensuring that the American people are no longer being fed the lies of the delusional Green New Scam,” said Aubrie Spady, the Interior’s deputy press secretary, in a statement. “The content was taken down because this administration believes in only administering facts based on real science to the American public, not brainless fear-mongering rhetoric used to steal taxpayer dollars.”
Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the National Park Service, put it a more neutral way: “The president has directed federal agencies to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values.”
The sign removals are part of a larger pattern to hide information about climate change from public view. In his second term, Trump has launched an assault on climate science, deleting landmark climate reports, slashing funding for climate research, and ending a program that tracked the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Language about the changing climate has vanished from federal websites, including entire pages about it on the Park Service website.
In response, scientists, academics, and other volunteers have worked to save the data that’s being lost and try to make it available for the public to find again.
The erasure of “negative” stories at national parks has spurred another such initiative, called “Save Our Signs.” The goal is to crowdsource photos of signs from National Park Service sites all around the country to create a publicly accessible collection. So far, Save Our Signs has received more than 10,000 photos from hundreds of sites, said Jenny McBurney, a government publications librarian who helped start the project.
Politicians are also pushing back. Last week, Pingree and dozens of representatives signed a letter to National Park Service director Jessica Bowron condemning the removal of historical signs and asking for detailed information on all the signs that had been flagged for violations, altered, or removed.
McBurney said that the Save Our Signs project is still accepting photos, even though it’s already seen an outpouring of support. “You can just tell that people really care about our parks, and they want to make sure that this important information is preserved.”