Six decades after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act into law, advocates warn the legislation faces an unprecedented and compounding threat.
Johnson declared at the October 15, 1966 signing that “we have come here this morning to give part of our country back to its people,” words that now carry a bitter irony for preservation groups.
Brent Leggs, president and CEO of the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, told NPR that federal divestment from preservation responsibilities has accelerated sharply over the past eighteen months.
“Preservation, from its inception, has worked best with public and private partnership,” Leggs said. “Over the last year and a half, the federal government has divested that responsibility.”
The 1966 law created the National Register of Historic Places, which today lists more than 100,000 landmarks, ranging from single trees to entire historic districts across the country.
Central to the law’s enforcement is a mechanism known as Section 106 review, which requires federal agencies to consult with states, tribes and stakeholders before proceeding with any project that could harm a registered historic site.
Elihu Rubin, a professor of architecture and urban studies at the Yale School of Architecture, described Section 106 as “the teeth behind the National Historic Preservation Act,” noting it compels federal projects to mitigate harm to historic resources before moving forward.
The nationwide average for completing a Section 106 review is just 16 days, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and 98% of those reviews conclude that a project will have no adverse effect on nearby historic resources.
That process now faces a two-pronged assault, with a federal advisory council packed with Trump appointees voting this summer to weaken Section 106 regulations while a bipartisan permitting reform bill moves through the Senate.
Greg Werkheiser, whose law firm Cultural Heritage Partners is leading a coalition called “Section 106 Strong,” warned the combined changes would effectively gut the law’s meaning for hundreds of thousands of sites across the country.
“It will effectively rewrite the National Historic Preservation Act in ways that, for all intents and purposes, gut its meaning and protections for hundreds of thousands of sites across the country,” Werkheiser said.
The “Section 106 Strong” coalition, which officially launched in October, spans 1,000 organizations including religious, environmental and civil rights groups, along with Tribal Nations collectively representing more than 9 million Americans.
The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, 20 of whose 24 current members were appointed by Trump, voted in July to limit which properties qualify as historic, make public comment optional and remove the requirement to consult Native American tribes.
A bipartisan group of senators separately introduced legislation framed as permitting reform, which would streamline Section 106 in similar ways by curtailing public and tribal input, narrowing the scope of analysis and restricting legal remedies for violations.
Valerie Grussing, NATHPO’s executive director of legislative affairs and strategic partnerships, said the proposed changes would represent “an enormous and devastating setback” not just to pre-1992 standards but to the foundational protections established before 1966.
Ira Matt, NATHPO’s executive director and a citizen of the Salish Tribe, warned that statutory changes embedded in legislation would be far harder to reverse than regulatory adjustments, risking consequences that would outlast the careers of most people now working in preservation.
“A lot of the preservation community’s looking at this, saying: ‘We do not want to be party to these changes that are going to outlive most of our careers,'” Matt said.
Chris Cody, senior associate general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, described the current moment as an “existential crisis” for preservation efforts nationally, noting that his two-person team now spends roughly 70 hours a week fielding emergency calls from local jurisdictions.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently launched a legal defense fund with an initial fundraising target of $10 million to protect historic sites and the laws that underpin them.
Werkheiser, who has worked in historic preservation and politics for three decades, said he has rarely seen a movement coalesce so rapidly, adding that “Americans are simply fed up with watching their history manipulated, defaced, or destroyed as an instrument of political power.”
