Judges have taken control of school systems and prisons, but the national parks? U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, a Biden appointee in Massachusetts, thinks she can dictate the information visitors receive at the nation’s parks and monuments, even what individual signs and plaques say and what displays must include. She has no such authority, of course, and her attempt to control the National Park Service (NPS) earns her our Dishonorable Judicial Conduct Award for July.
On March 27, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directing a review of public monuments, memorials, and other federal properties. The Secretary of the Interior was to determine whether, since Jan. 1, 2020, those properties have been changed or removed to “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history… or include any other improper partisan ideology.”
Secretary Doug Burgum issued a directive two months later to implement the executive order. The National Park Service found clear ideological messages on issues such as climate change, gay rights, “indigenous history,” slavery, and others. Several organizations sued under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), claiming that these actions were “contrary to law” by violating three other statutes. On June 12, 2026, Kelley gave the NPS 21 days to restore or reinstall everything that had been removed and to stop any further alterations to “interpretive materials.”
Kelley’s order is wrong on two levels. A panel of Democratic-appointed judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit quickly put her order on hold because she had improperly applied the criteria for a preliminary injunction and the government was likely to ultimately prevail in the litigation before her. Such intervention by a judge like Kelley in the regular legal process is supposed to be rare, even “extraordinary,” reserved only for cases where there will be “irreparable harm” to the plaintiffs if they have to wait for a decision on the merits.
Here, the plaintiff organizations made vague claims about, as the First Circuit put it, “aesthetic, recreational, and informational harms.” But that’s not enough. For a court to intervene by imposing an injunction, plaintiffs must show that they will suffer actual, concrete harms. These plaintiffs failed to do that at all. In fact, the only concrete “harm” they alleged was that one member of one organization had used NPS interpretive materials to educate her school-age children – but not even the material that the NPS was now reviewing or removing! While this calls into serious question whether these plaintiffs had legal standing in the first place, Kelley didn’t care that they didn’t even come close to meeting the bare minimum standard for filing a lawsuit.
Kelley’s order is also wrong on a broader level. She claimed that the NPS was violating the Organic Act, the Omnibus Management Act, and the Centennial Act. Those statutes, however, are simply aspirational charges for the NPS to do good things for the country. They are full of language about “the enjoyment of future generations,” the “benefit and inspiration of all the people,” maintaining “a broad program of the highest quality science and information,” and “providing opportunities for people to…gain awareness, appreciation, and understanding of the [National Park] System.”
It’s no wonder that none of these statutes contain any criteria or guidance for realizing these lofty goals, let alone provide for any private lawsuits to enforce them. Undeterred, Kelley acted as if these statutes mandated certain ideological and political views (her views, obviously) and that failing to do so to her satisfaction somehow violated the law. That is an absurd notion.
According to Kelley, the NPS “has recognized” that “[h]istory has typically been presented from the perspective of the dominant group in power” and “affirmed its role in ‘expand[ing] ideas about power, science, gender, race, and more.’” Really? Says who?
None of that language appears in any of the NPS statutes. It does, however, appear in one of the very interpretive revisions by the Biden administration that the NPS removed last year. That display, added to the Muir Woods National Monument in California, is even called “History Under Construction.” Yes, it is, and it looks like Kelley is on the construction crew.
Other examples of Biden NPS revisions that Kelley apparently thought acceptable: information added to the Francis G. Newlands Memorial Fountain in Maryland to emphasize his “white supremacist” views and an exhibit at Glacier National Park warning about increasing carbon dioxide and glacier loss.
The national parks, Kelley writes, are “America’s largest classroom” and, in her view, the Trump administration is removing from the curriculum materials “that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths.” Every administration makes judgments about what to include and how to present information in limited national park spaces. The Biden NPS certainly did.
Kelley simply prefers Biden’s narrative to Trump’s and thinks she has legal authority to brand whatever does not suit her ideological fancy as unlawful and dictate the curriculum of “America’s largest classroom.”
She doesn’t have such authority. Government agency actions are not “arbitrary and capricious” or “contrary to law” simply because some federal judge doesn’t like them or has a different view of history and would make different decisions if she ran the agency. But she is not the Secretary of the Interior, and she doesn’t run that (or any other) agency or our national parks.
If she resigned her position and applied to become a Park Ranger, we’d all be better off except for the park visitors who were subjected to her warped view of America.
For trying to hijack the president’s authority over the national parks, Judge Kelley deserves our July Dishonorable Judicial Conduct Award.
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