President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2026 discretionary budget is called a “skinny budget” because it’s short on line-by-line details.
But historic preservation efforts in the U.S. did get a mention – and they might as well be skinned to the bone.
Trump has proposed to slash funding for the federal Historic Preservation Fund to only $11 million, which is $158 million less than the fund’s previous reauthorization in 2024. The presidential discretionary budget, however, always heads to Congress for appropriation. And Congress always makes changes.
That said, the Trump administration hasn’t even released the $188 million that Congress appropriated for the fund for the 2025 fiscal year, essentially impounding the funding stream that Congress created in 1976 for historic preservation activities across the nation.
A rare, deficit-neutral funding model
Most Americans probably don’t realize that the task of historic preservation largely falls to individual states and Native American tribes.
The National Historic Preservation Act that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1966 requires states and tribes to handle everything from identifying potential historic sites to reviewing the impact of interstate highway projects on archaeological sites and historic buildings. States and tribes are also responsible for reviewing nominations of sites in the National Register of Historic Places, the nation’s official list of properties deemed worthy of preservation.
However, many states and tribes didn’t have the capacity to adequately tackle the mandates of the 1966 act. So the Historic Preservation Fund was formed a decade later to alleviate these costs by funneling federal resources into these efforts.
The fund is actually the product of a conservative, limited-government approach.
Read more on The Conversation.
Learn more about Rhode Island’s historical preservation here.
