The Interior Department has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request related to records showing how it is implementing an order to scrub “disparaging” content about American history from national parks. The move prompted Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a whistleblower protection nonprofit, to file a FOIA lawsuit against the agency on June 17.
The lawsuit demands that DOI's Office of the Secretary turn over documents detailing how Secretary Doug Burgum's Secretarial Order No. 3431, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," is being carried out across the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Bureau of Reclamation. Specifically, PEER wants to know which properties were reviewed, what content was flagged, who made the final calls, and what was removed, altered, or “restored” as a result.
The group’s FOIA request was filed on September 5, 2025. Under FOIA, DOI was required to respond within 30 working days, but it has now been over nine months.
“The public has a right to know who inside this administration is deciding what version of American history gets told at our national parks and other public lands, and on what basis,” said Tony Irish, PEER senior counsel. “Instead, the Office of the Secretary has spent nearly a year stonewalling a simple records request on how decisions were being made by the Secretary.”
A federal judge in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction on June 12 blocking DOI and the National Park Service from continuing the effort to remove information at park sites, finding that the Secretary's order “disregarded” the agency's “responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments” and that it “sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization.” The court also ordered restoration of materials already altered or removed at National Park Service sites, and required the administration to provide the court with an update on progress restoring the censored information within five days and once each week thereafter.
“We better know ourselves and our history by visiting and learning from America’s largest classroom,” said Free Information Group Partner Kevin Bell, who is representing PEER in the FOIA lawsuit. “Clearly the Trump administration knows the value of public information, or they would not be so frantically attempting to remove it. Interior’s attempt to hide the records of its clumsy rewrite is further evidence they know they are doing wrong.”
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