Why Biden administration renamed 650 geographic features

U.S. President Donald Trump has, as of this writing, issued two executive orders during his second term mandating that the Interior Department, in coordination with the country’s Board on Geographic Names, rename these familiar landmarks:

1. the Gulf of Mexico, to the Gulf of America
2. Denali, to Mount McKinley, restoring the government’s official name for the tallest mountain in North America from 1917 to 2015
3. Lake Ontario, to Lake America

Trump’s orders were criticized around the world, including by many Americans.

But according to posts on social media, former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration engaged in its own renaming spree, changing the official names of approximately 650 different geographic features. This, the posts said, is evidence that the public holds a double standard against Trump.

Snopes readers searched the site looking to see whether the government had actually renamed 650 different locations during Joe Biden’s presidency. We found the claim was true, though comparing the two actions was a reach.

The Biden-era efforts, led by then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, had one goal: renaming locations throughout the U.S. whose names included a racial slur demeaning Native American women. Trump’s executive orders, by contrast, targeted some of the country’s most prominent landmarks, including two bodies of water only partially controlled by the U.S.

“Derogatory names have previously been identified by the Secretary of the Interior or the Board on Geographic Names and have been comprehensively replaced,” read the Interior Department’s November 2021 news release announcing the order. As precedent, it cited a 1962 order eliminating the use of the N-word and a 1974 order eliminating the use of a slur for Japanese people.

In September 2022, the Interior Department published a news release announcing that the Board on Geographic Names had approved new names for each of the affected locations, alongside a list of all the changes and a map of the renamed locations. There were indeed approximately 650 new names.

It’s worth noting, though, that beyond the renamed Olympic Valley, California, which hosted the 1960 Winter Olympic Games, none of the locations that underwent a name change under Biden could be considered nationally prominent in the same way as Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Mexico or Denali. 

For further reading, we’ve also covered a rumor suggesting that Trump signed an executive order renaming the state of New Mexico to “New America.”

Sources