FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Contact:
Tony Irish | (202) 524-4399 | [email protected]
Kevin Bell | (202) 946-3642
PEER Sues Interior Department for Hiding How it Decides What American History to Rewrite
Agency Stonewalls FOIA as it Strips History from Public Lands
Washington, DC — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of the Interior (DOI) after the agency spent more than nine months refusing to release any records showing how it is implementing an order to scrub “disparaging” content about American history from national parks, monuments, and other public lands.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, 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, including merchandise sold by concessionaires, gift shops, and museums.
“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.”
PEER filed its FOIA request on September 5, 2025, seeking basic information: which properties were reviewed, what content was flagged, who made the final calls, and what was removed, altered, or “restored” as a result. Under FOIA, DOI was required to respond within 30 working days — by October 21, 2025.
On June 12, 2026, a federal judge in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking DOI and the National Park Service from continuing this effort 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.
This FOIA lawsuit, which is not related to the Massachusetts case, seeks records from the Office of the Secretary about how this directive was carried out across all the major lands agencies within the Department of the Interior and within the merchandizing functions of these land agencies.
“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 action. “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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PEER protects public employees who protect our environment. We are a service organization for environmental and public health professionals, land managers, scientists, enforcement officers and other civil servants dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values. We work with current and former federal, state, local and tribal employees.