In November of last year, Cultural Heritage Partners PLLC Co-Founder Marion Werkheiser was the keynote speaker for the annual National Preservation Law Conference 2025. In her presentation – “Shifting Landscapes and Preservation Law” she provided an overview and assessment of the current state of preservation law and how administrative and judicial changes may affect the landscape for the future of preservation law – and a clarion call for courage to defend history and democracy.
The full text of her remarks is presented below. It is worth noting that since Marion gave this presentation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has filed suit against the agencies and officials responsible for the review and permitting of the White House Ballroom project “asserting that ongoing construction of the White House ballroom is unlawful…”
Introduction: History and Democracy Are Bound Together
Thank you so much to the National Trust for inviting me to speak today. My first work experience in preservation law was as an intern at the law department when I was a 3L, and I am incredibly grateful to Betsy Merritt, Paul Edmondson, and others in this room who have mentored me and collaborated with me over the years.
I got into preservation law because, like all of us in this room, I love history. I’m also a political junkie. Indeed, I was up way too late last night watching the election returns come in. I went to law school and co-founded our cultural heritage law firm because historic preservation is not just about saving places, it’s about who gets to own history, who gets to interpret it, and who gets to tell their stories. And while much of the broader public still has outdated views of historic preservation as blue haired ladies saving Presidential homes, today we all must realize—now more than ever—that our work is inherently political.
Today I want to focus on a hard truth that should guide our profession as preservation lawyers:
The defense of history is, at its core, the defense of democracy itself.
Democracy rests on memory. It cannot survive without it. Without understanding what has come before, citizens cannot make informed choices, leaders cannot be held accountable, and marginalized voices cannot be heard. Every archive, every historic site, every monument, every history curriculum—these are not just artifacts of the past. They are the infrastructure of self-government.
And yet today, federal policies are actively undermining that infrastructure. We are witnessing a strategic attempt to control what is remembered, to erase what is inconvenient, and to dictate which stories are allowed to survive.
As preservation lawyers, we stand on the front lines of this battle. And I want to show you today why our work is more urgent than ever, how the legal tools we wield can defend both history and democracy, and why neutrality is no longer an option.
Part I: Federal Attacks on History Under the Trump Administration
Let’s be specific. We are witnessing federal actions that strike at the heart of historic preservation. Environmental and historic preservation compliance has been whittled down by executive orders asserting “national emergencies,” by substantial cuts to funding and staff across Federal agencies, reductions in force and coerced retirements, chaotic funding for State and Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs and THPOs) that led to multiple layoffs of review staff across the country, and by a deregulatory push that prevents preservationists from updating guidance to reflect the latest standards.
My firm works across the country representing Tribes, African American descendant communities, local governments, and historic property stewards on permitting reviews, and we interact with multiple federal agencies and a variety of regional districts and divisions. I can share that at the 30,000-foot level, we are seeing federal agencies paralyzed by staff losses and NEPA and Section 106 reviews dramatically curtailed.
We are seeing federal agencies pulling every lever they can to bypass environmental and cultural resources reviews, stripping away opportunities for public input and cutting Tribes, communities, and preservationists out of the process. Multiple court cases, regulatory rollbacks, executive orders, and new legislation have significantly altered how NEPA operates, making the requirements much less clear, creating more variation and unpredictability among agencies, limiting consideration of cumulative effects, and shortening the statute of limitations to challenge harmful projects.
As a Section 106 practitioner, I am particularly alarmed at executive orders that allow entire industries to bypass historic preservation review because of fake emergencies declared by the President. By allowing “emergency procedures” to be used to bypass consultation with communities, Tribes, and local governments, the administration is removing critical pathways to identifying historic places, understanding their significance, and informing decisions about what types of adverse effects are tolerable. The independent agencies charged with ensuring proper compliance with Section 106 have obeyed in advance and agreed that these emergency procedures can be used indefinitely. And the Advisory Council has refused to respond to my firm’s FOIA request and continues to help federal agencies keep these projects secret from the public until it is too late to raise objections.
When historic preservation laws like the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 were passed, Congress wasn’t only protecting buildings—they were asserting that the tangible remains of our history matter to civic life. We need to realize that many of the changes adopted in the name of “streamlining” are actually censorship designed to suppress viewpoints and community opinions.
We are seeing other coordinated efforts to disrupt our national memory. Federal pressure has distorted how history is taught and presented in publicly funded spaces, pushing selective narratives while discouraging honest reckoning with racism, colonization, and injustice. Firing the National Archivist and reducing funding for our national archives, museums, and libraries means collections go without preservation, staffing shrinks, and researchers face restricted access.
Federal institutions who steward American history—our national parks, national monuments, the Smithsonian– are now subject to ideological reviews and are being forced to remove or whitewash signage about racism, slavery, Japanese internment, women’s history, and LGBTQ history. SHPO and THPO grants have been made contingent on the administration determining that these entities have complied with executive orders on “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”—which really means whether they are advancing the President’s preferred white nationalist narrative of American history.
These executive orders have had wide ranging impacts. The order ending Federal DEI programs was on paper framed as ending “wasteful” initiatives. In practice, it has gutted the capacity of museums, archives, and cultural institutions that rely on federal grants to support programming on race, gender, and marginalized histories. DEI offices in federal museums were defunded. Staff were reassigned or fired. Exhibits and programs that had been designed to confront systemic racism or gender discrimination were now vulnerable to cancellation for fear of violating federal policy. The chilling effect was immediate. Educators and curators began self-censoring. This is more than administrative housekeeping—it is a deliberate narrowing of the stories we are allowed to tell.
The order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and its accompanying Department of the Interior Secretarial orders have directed the Smithsonian Institution and federal museums to strip exhibits of so-called “improper ideology.” It empowered federal overseers to review and alter content, demanding that monuments and exhibits reflect only “solemn and uplifting” narratives. It charged the public with becoming informants on the National Park Service, asking them to report signage and interpretive materials that contain negative portrayals of past or living Americans. The federal government has claimed authority to dictate museum interpretation—placing curatorial judgment, once the domain of scholarship, under political control.
This narrative is also poised to receive special emphasis in our nation’s classrooms. The Department of Education recently announced its proposed “patriotic education funding priority.” The proposal calls for emphasizing the role of faith and the influence of Western civilization on America’s founding. Our friends at national organizations including the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association are warning us that these priorities risk “promoting a narrow, ideologically driven narrative of US history at the expense of honest, evidence-based inquiry and diverse perspectives.” At the same time it announced this funding priority, the Education Department also announced a new initiative related to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country—an America 250 Civics Education Coalition in partnership with the America First Policy Institute and Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk.
In addition to narrowing what Americans are told about their history and allowed to learn in classrooms, the White House has narrowed what it expects America to look like in its architecture and monuments. Recent executive orders mandate classical architecture for federal buildings and call for the reinstallation of confederate monuments taken down after the murder of George Floyd.
We are also seeing public lands protections rolled back at record pace. Congressional and executive actions have repealed BLM’s resource management plans in multiple states, opened thousands of acres of public lands to mining and fossil fuel development, and are moving to repeal the Public Lands Rule that put protection of cultural resources on equal footing with energy development. The Department of Justice has also issued a new legal opinion that says Presidents can abolish national monuments, which puts over 150 national monuments at risk.
We are also seeing the White House make maps political. An executive order issued on the president’s first day in office commanded the restoration of “traditional” names like “Mount McKinley” instead of Denali and decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Changing names is not just semantics; it is erasure of Indigenous heritage, a denial of the cultural narratives that pre-date colonization. For preservation lawyers, this is a direct attack on the principle that heritage is plural, that memory belongs to many communities, not just those in power.
Of course, this parade of horribles would not be complete without mentioning the President’s Budget and the White House’s attempts to pull back lawfully appropriated funding. The administration’s budget proposed slashing the Historic Preservation Fund from $170 million to roughly $11 million. That money is what keeps SHPOs and THPOs alive. It pays for staff who review Section 106 projects, who survey and list properties on the National Register, who preserve the cultural resources of tribal nations. Cutting the fund so dramatically would mean SHPOs and THPOs could not do their work. It means projects would go unreviewed, sites will be lost, and communities will be voiceless in federal decision-making. At the same time, the White House has terminated grants to the civic organizations that participate in these reviews. This is not just about funding. It is about silencing the very mechanisms that ensure the public’s voice in preservation.
We all know these are terrible things for our profession. But what do they have to do with democracy?
Together, these actions—eliminating DEI, renaming places, censoring museums, and defunding preservation—are part of a single pattern: they centralize narrative control in the hands of the state and strip away our voices.
- They erase Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and marginalized histories.
- They intimidate educators, curators, and preservationists into silence.
- They cripple the offices and institutions designed to defend history on the ground.
Why does this matter? Why is it not just policy differences, but democracy itself at stake in this war on history?
- When monuments are politicized, public memory becomes propaganda. Shrinking Indigenous monuments while protecting Confederate statues tells us whose stories the state values.
- When curricula are censored, the next generation grows up unprepared. Students denied the truth about slavery or civil rights cannot understand present inequalities.
- When archives are destroyed, accountability dies. A destroyed record is not just lost paper—it is lost evidence.
- When cultural funding is gutted, plural voices are silenced. Without NEH and HPF grants, community preservation projects wither.
- When the state dictates heroes and architecture, democracy shrinks. Public space is narrowed to reflect only one narrative.
Each of these actions is different in form, but together they add up to one thing: a systematic attack on history. These actions escalate narrative control at the federal level: not just what buildings or landscapes get protected, but which histories are told, how they are told, and which actors remain visible and which are erased. They are designed to reshape national memory into a single, state-approved story. That is the definition of authoritarianism.
Part III: What Lawyers Can Do
What can preservation lawyers do? It turns out, a great deal. We are not powerless. In fact, we are the ones who can turn these attacks into opportunities for resistance.
First of all, we need to litigate aggressively. We need to challenge agency attempts to sidestep NEPA and Section 106. We need to file FOIA requests and file public records lawsuits when responses are unlawfully delayed or records destroyed. Let’s use the courts to create new precedents for preservation, and let’s defend archivists, curators, and librarians under attack for making contested materials available.
We will not win them all. But remember– as lawyers, we are not only advocates, we are witnesses. Litigation itself creates important historical archives: discovery, exhibits, and affidavits become part of the preserved historical record. They are a way of saving the truth.
Every complaint you file, every brief you draft, every FOIA lawsuit you bring is not just a legal tactic. It is documentation of the erosion of democracy. Your filings become part of the archive. They are evidence for future generations of the truth and that someone fought back. Your work becomes part of our history.
Second, we need to defend the record. We should partner with journalists and NGOs to litigate for transparency. We need to work with technologists to ensure digital collections are legally protected under copyright, licensing, and cybersecurity frameworks. And that there are backups not on government websites. Let’s push for open-access agreements that make historical records resilient against censorship. And let’s prepare for escalation.
We must be realistic: pressures on archives, historic sites, and educators are not going to diminish. They are going to intensify. And when they do, lawyers will be called on to act quickly. That means preparing now. We must build preservation strike forces. We have to be faster, nimbler, and more coordinated.
The last two weeks have shown us how much we need rapid response legal networks to intervene when historic sites are threatened. When the President began destroying the East Wing of the White House, no one went to court. The East Wing demolition began on October 20th, and the only legal challenge to the demolition was submitted when demolition was almost over four days later. That lawsuit was unlikely to prevail on the merits because of the unique role of the White House under the NHPA, but there are other legal arguments that could have been brought. Why weren’t they?
We must prepare a coalition with deep expertise and the ability to respond quickly. We as preservation lawyers must think about the levers and limits of power and get imaginative about what this White House will do next and evaluate what other legal approaches might be successful in those circumstances. We also need to be drafting model legislation to expand state and local protections for cultural heritage.
Another part of our preparation for escalation is training younger lawyers in preservation law so they can step in quickly. Please bring law students and young attorneys into this work. We need a pipeline of lawyers who see preservation not as niche, but as central to the defense of democracy.
We Need to Protect Vulnerable Sites and Stories
Go beyond the high-profile landmarks. Fight for local cemeteries, Indigenous sacred lands, African American neighborhoods, LGBTQ+ historic spaces. Given the loss of federal employees in the cultural resources sector, underrepresented communities will be getting even less support navigating the bureaucracy of preservation and environmental review and the system is even more likely to overlook their unique insights into historic significance. Amplify their voices.
Expose the Erosion
Don’t let bureaucratic rollbacks pass quietly. Litigate when possible. Write op-eds, file amicus briefs, speak at hearings about the real-world impacts of the loss of existing protections. Shine a light on how “streamlining” is really censorship in disguise.
Defend the Defenders
Archivists, librarians, educators, curators — these professionals are under attack. Use your expertise to defend them legally when they face harassment or political interference.
Expose authoritarian drift.
Write op-eds, testify at hearings, connect the dots between these policies and the authoritarian playbook.
Make the case that preservation is not nostalgia—it is democratic defense. And so, I return to where I began:
Because the defense of history is, at its core, the defense of democracy itself.
When truth is erased, the people cannot govern themselves.
When archives are silenced, power escapes accountability.
When the voices of the marginalized are cut from the story, democracy shrinks to a shadow of itself.
Our work to preserve historic places and the hard truths they tell is preserving the very tools citizens need to hold power to account. And when we insist that all voices are remembered—not just the comfortable ones—we expand the promise of democracy for everyone.
All of the licensed attorneys here have sworn oaths to support the Constitution of the United States. To defend history is to defend the people’s right to know, the people’s right to speak, and the people’s right to rule themselves. Our work is not just about history museums, archives, or monuments. It is about the survival of the Constitution and our democracy.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with advice for this moment from Sarah Sophie Flicker, a founder of the Women’s March on Washington: “When asked to betray your integrity: Hold fast to your ideals, gum up the works, disobey when able. Question everything, say nothing. Keep meticulous records. Leverage your advantages and harbor those who have none. Get in the way. Tell the story. Archive the truth.”