The administration of US President Donald Trump is seeking to purge “anti-American” narratives from the country’s national parks and museums, several media outlets have reported, citing a leaked government database. Among the themes reportedly identified for removal are racism and climate change.

After returning to the White House in 2025, Trump prioritized combating what he calls ‘woke bias.’ He has since signed several executive orders rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government and its regulated industries.

On Monday, an anonymous group describing itself as “civil servants on the front lines” published the database, which presumably includes hundreds of submissions by national park employees regarding last year’s executive orders, which instruct parks to remove any content “that inappropriately disparages Americans...or that emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur” of natural features.

According to the Washington Post, most inquiries concern sites and exhibits that deal with historical instances of violence against African-Americans and the civil rights movement, along with such topics as slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, and relations between Indigenous peoples and white colonizers.

The group that published the database said that it shows how the Trump administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”

A spokesperson for the US Department of the Interior, which manages federal lands and national parks, told Reuters that the documents had been “edited before being inappropriately and illegally released to the media in ways that misrepresented the status of this effort.” The official described them as “draft, deliberative internal ​documents [which] are not a representation of final action taken by the department.”

“Employees who altered internal records and leaked in an effort to hurt the Trump administration will be held ​accountable,” the spokesperson added.

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