The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is voting on revisions to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act — the regulatory framework that has required federal agencies to consult with the public and with tribes before building projects affecting historic sites for six decades. The revisions are being voted by email with a one-week deadline ending Friday, July 24, 2026. Acting chair Travis Voyles sent the email requesting the vote. The council’s appointed composition — 21 of its 24 members are Trump appointees — operates as the structural hub from which every substantive change radiates through two coupled mechanisms: substance and velocity. The proposed revisions would narrow which properties qualify for historic designation, eliminate mandatory tribal consultation, make public comment optional, and exempt large categories of federally funded state and local projects from review. Critics have called the changes a “gut[ting]” of protections. The council’s own internal memo acknowledges the post-World War II era of urban renewal and highway construction that prompted the 1966 law as “one of the greatest, yet most destructive building streaks in American history.” The same council is now proposing to exempt from review the exact class of projects — state highway widenings, urban infrastructure — that the law was enacted to oversee.

What the revisions change

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to evaluate the effects of construction projects on historic properties before those projects proceed. The National Register of Historic Places contains over 100,000 properties encompassing more than 1.8 million buildings, structures, sites, objects, and districts. The framework has operated since 1966, when Congress enacted it in response to urban renewal and federal highway construction that destroyed landmarks including Penn Station and devastated historically Black neighborhoods.

The proposed revisions would restructure that framework in four principal ways. First, the revisions would narrow which properties qualify for historic designation, excluding what the National Trust for Historic Preservation describes as “significant cultural landscape features” such as the Grand Canyon. Second, the revisions would make public comment on federal projects optional, eliminating current regulatory language at 36 CFR §800.2(d)(1) that states “views of the public are essential to informed Federal decisionmaking.” Third, the revisions would remove the requirement that agencies consult with Native American tribes — converting what the current statute frames as a government-to-government obligation into executive discretion. Fourth, the revisions would exempt categories of federally funded state and local projects from review. Section 106 applies only to federal actions — federally funded projects, federal permits, and federal land management — not to all construction nationally. The proposed exemptions would narrow the universe of federal actions that trigger review without repealing the statute itself.

Sara Bronin, the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Biden, said the changes would create an “alarming number of exemptions,” including for federally funded projects carried out by local authorities. “Things like state highway widening, which in the past have been highly destructive of historic places, including not only whole neighborhoods but also burial sites … won’t [undergo Section 106 review] under the new rules,” Bronin said.

How composition drives the change

Twenty-one of the council’s 24 members are Trump appointees. Acting chair Travis Voyles sent council members an email requesting they vote by the end of Friday, July 24, on draft language obtained by NPR — a one-week window for revisions that would reshape a framework covering more than a million structures. The same body that controls the substance of the revisions also controls the procedural timeline. The composition produces the policy shift — Greg Werkheiser, founding partner at the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners, called the vote a “foregone conclusion given the council’s composition” — while the compressed timeline limits the window for organized response before the rulemaking process enters its next phase.

The council’s own memo provides the efficiency rationale: a 2019 study it cites found that consultation can take “nearly seven years in extreme cases.” The study is not identified by name or institution in the memo’s public framing. The logical path from “consultation is slow” to “eliminate consultation” admits alternatives that the proposed revisions do not take. Congress could reform timelines without eliminating review. State historic preservation offices that administer delegated reviews could be empowered as alternative consultation infrastructure. Each of these alternatives corresponds to a third-side role — Congress as potential equalizer or referee, SHPOs as potential provider — that remains unfilled because the council’s composition insulates it from the accountability that would produce them. The one-week email voting window is a velocity mechanism with no baseline provided in the reporting for comparison; the reader cannot assess whether it is genuinely accelerated or standard practice for the ACHP.

The historical irony

The council’s own reform memo describes the post-World War II period of urban renewal and federal highway construction as “one of the greatest, yet most destructive building streaks in American history” — the same era that prompted Congress to pass the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. Charles Birnbaum, founding president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, drew the parallel directly: “Consent of the governed is being replaced with my way or the highway. This is the same haughty, retrograde, and myopic attitude that resulted in urban renewal, which decimated cities with highways and destroyed countless neighborhoods nationwide, especially underserved communities.”

The agency producing the revision describes the destructive era in its own memo, then exempts the same class of activity — federally funded highway and infrastructure projects — from the review process designed to prevent its recurrence. The proposed exemptions cover the project category that the 1966 Act was specifically enacted to bring under federal oversight after those projects destroyed the neighborhoods and burial sites the Act was built to protect. The council is, in the same document, diagnosing the disease and reproducing its cause. The administrative branch is dismantling the procedural architecture that stands between historic communities and the bulldozers that have been let in before. The 1966 settlement is being reversed by the institution the 1966 settlement created.

The missing voices

The public record on the proposed changes is structurally one-sided. The revisions would eliminate mandatory consultation with Native American tribes, but no tribal representative, tribal government, or tribal organization is quoted on the record. The National Congress of American Indians and tribal historic preservation officers are absent. The reader cannot assess whether the elimination of mandatory consultation is uniformly opposed by tribes, or whether some tribal governments might prefer the flexibility of voluntary consultation — a position that has surfaced in other federal consultation reform debates.

On the other side of the policy trade-off, no state DOT official, developer, or local government representative who might support streamlining is quoted. Greg Werkheiser, Sara Bronin, and Charles Birnbaum are all preservation advocates or former Biden appointees; their testimony covers the preservation case but does not address the operational frustrations the council’s memo identifies. The closest the public record comes to the efficiency rationale is the council’s own memo, framed against the destructive era it describes.

This sourcing asymmetry does not change what the proposed revisions would do — the changes, the timeline, and the named sources’ positions are documented. But it means the trade-off between preservation safeguards and infrastructure delivery appears in the public record as a one-sided argument rather than a contested policy question. A reader whose primary concern is getting roads built and schools funded would find the public debate entirely hostile to reform, with no acknowledgment that operational frustrations exist alongside the protections.

Structural shifts not obvious from surface

A cross-link between branches of preservation law: removing “significant landscape features” like the Grand Canyon from eligibility strips the advocacy coalition that has historically used Section 106 to challenge federal projects on large landscapes of its legal hook. This is a cross-link between the natural-landscape branch and the built-environment branch of preservation law, quietly disarming a constituency that operates in a different register from the urban built-environment lobby.

A Grand Canyon verification gap: the claim that the proposed rule would exclude “significant cultural landscape features such as the Grand Canyon” is attributed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but the regulatory language itself is not reproduced in any public source. The reader cannot verify whether the Trust’s characterization is the most natural reading of the proposed text or whether it overstates the scope.

A statutory scope omission: Section 106 applies only to federal actions — federally funded projects, federal permits, and federal land management — not to all construction nationally. The published reporting does not clarify this limitation, leaving a reader unfamiliar with the statutory framework unable to calibrate the reform’s actual reach.

Third-side role dismantlement

The ACHP is dismantling the roles it was designed to perform. The provider role — the body that administers the review process — is being dissolved by the provider itself. The equalizer role — the public comment and tribal consultation provisions that gave non-institutional stakeholders procedural parity with federal agencies — is being deleted from the rulebook. The conflict has shifted from the resolution cluster (public comment, tribal consultation, agency review) to the containment cluster (litigation, public documentation). The referee role now falls to the U.S. District Court for D.C. The witness role is being performed by the press and the named critics. The teacher role — which would guide communities through the coming 30-day comment period — remains unfilled. Werkheiser’s promise of litigation — “As sure as the sun rises and sets over Washington, D.C., there will be litigation in an attempt to stop this absurd gutting of protections of American history” — confirms that the adversarial frame is the only remaining channel.

Procedural safeguards remaining

The council vote is not the final word. Any revision must clear the federal rulemaking process, including a roughly 30-day public comment period, before taking effect. That procedural safeguard is itself part of what the revisions propose to change — making public comment optional rather than mandatory — creating a tension between the process that authorizes the revision and the revision’s own treatment of public input. Litigation is anticipated. The federal judiciary would serve as arbiter, reviewing whether the agency acted within its rulemaking authority under the Administrative Procedure Act. The compressed voting timeline and the potential compression of the comment period could narrow the legal window for pre-enforcement challenge, though the APA’s requirements for final agency action provide a procedural basis for judicial review.

Open questions

  • Whether the 30-day comment period will proceed on the standard administrative timeline or be similarly compressed — indicating whether the accelerated pattern extends beyond the council vote
  • Whether any tribal nations have filed or are preparing formal objections to the consultation-elimination provision — testing whether Indigenous communities are mobilizing their procedural rights
  • Whether the 2019 delay study cited by the council’s memo was conducted internally or externally, and whether its methodology supports elimination rather than streamlining as the appropriate remedy — testing the evidentiary basis for the council’s framing
  • Whether any of the council’s three non-Trump members will vote against the proposed revisions — determining whether the internal record contains disagreement
  • The composition of the ACHP after the November 2026 election, should the administration change — affecting the political durability of any rule change

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Red-Team Assessment
Models a capable adversary probing a plan for the seams they would exploit.
Relationship Mapping
Extracts the network of ties among people, institutions, and entities.
The Third Side
Takes the vantage of the surrounding community that has a stake in resolving a conflict (Ury).