1. United States
2. Pa.
3. Letter

You need to act now to block the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation's proposed revisions to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. On July 24, 2026, a board packed with 21 Trump appointees voted to gut the 60-year-old provision that requires federal agencies to consider impacts on historic properties and seek public input. More than 100,000 listed properties and 1.8 million sites, structures, and districts would lose protections — including, as former ACHP chair Sara Bronin warned, significant cultural landscapes like the Grand Canyon. The damage doesn't stop there. These revisions would strip the tribal consultation requirement before opening Chaco Canyon — a UNESCO World Heritage Site with over 4,700 archaeological sites — to oil and gas extraction. Cochiti Pueblo governor Phillip Quintana called it "one of the most important Indigenous cultural landscapes in North America." Eliminating that consultation requirement isn't streamlining government; it's erasing communities from decisions about their own heritage. The administration is also claiming the White House Office of Administration is exempt from the NHPA entirely — a precedent that, as Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners warned, would let the president remove any project from agency oversight. That logic could fast-track pipelines through wilderness just as easily as it paints over historic granite. Hold hearings, use every procedural tool available, and make clear this dismantling of historic preservation law will not go unanswered.