The Word Is "Restoring"

This action restores common sense, respects private property, provides much-needed certainty for landowners and follows the statute Congress actually passed. — Doug Burgum

That was Interior Secretary Burgum last week, explaining the rescission of the Endangered Species Act's 50-year-old regulatory definition of "harm" ^[1]. The same word appears in the title of the executive order that pulled slavery exhibits from national parks: "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" ^[2]. It appears in the OPM director's description of reclassifying 8,000 federal employees as at-will workers: "a restoration of the democratic process" ^[3]. And it appears in the DHS spokesperson's defense of re-separating children from parents in violation of a court-approved legal settlement: "restoring the rule of law" ^[4]. Four unrelated domains, one verb. It is not a coincidence of speechwriting. It is the signature of a method. What the administration is removing, across domain after domain, is not merely regulations. It is the definitions that give regulations their force: the legal, scientific, and cultural frameworks that compel the state to recognize something as harm, as history, as belonging, or as a limit on its own power. Each removal is framed not as an act of erasure but as a return to what the law "actually" said, to what history "truly" was, to what the Constitution "originally" meant. Start with what counts as harm. The ESA "harm" definition is the latest in a series of environmental reversals. EPA Administrator Zeldin has already repealed the 2009 endangerment finding, the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten current and future generations and the legal foundation for all federal climate regulation ^[5]. Interior Secretary Burgum has inverted the default presumption for 55 National Park sites: where protection was once the baseline and hunting required a specific exception, now "public and federally managed lands should be open to hunting and fishing unless a specific, documented, and legally supported exception applies" ^[6]. And the administration has shrunk Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by 90 percent, from 3.2 million acres to under 303,000, opening the land to mining and energy leasing within 60 days ^[7]. In each case, the target is not a particular permit or limit. It is the definition that made protection the state's default posture. Then there is what counts as history. The "Restoring Truth and Sanity" order has resulted in the removal or modification of at least 59 signs and exhibits across 37 national park sites, covering slavery, civil rights, Indigenous history, and climate change data ^[8]. A public tip line established by the order drew 35,000 comments; more than half condemned the initiative, and only 47 actually flagged exhibits. The project is driven by ideological definition, not public demand. Appeals courts have allowed much of it to proceed. The Third Circuit ruled that the federal government's duty to maintain a site does not guarantee permanence of specific exhibits, and new panels at the President's House in Philadelphia now omit slave trade route maps and the headline "The Dirty Business of Slavery" ^[9]. Meanwhile, the administration removed Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day from the National Park Service's fee-free admission days and replaced them with Trump's own birthday ^[10].

We is costing our country (USA) so much to keep all of these businesses closed. — Donald Trump

What counts as belonging has been redefined along multiple axes. The executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of unauthorized or temporary immigrants was struck down 6-3 by the Supreme Court, though Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence opened the door for Congress to legislate exceptions ^[11]. The immigration court system has been overhauled: judges labeled "activist" were replaced with "law enforcement-focused professionals," and the asylum grant rate dropped from over 50 percent to 7 percent ^[12]. The DEI executive order redefines diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as "racially discriminatory," inverting the meaning of civil rights law by treating efforts to address racial inequity as violations of anti-discrimination principles ^[13]. The boundary of law itself is under revision. A presidential commission on religious liberty has proposed replacing the doctrine of separation of church and state with "bridges between faith and government," arguing that the phrase "separation" is not in the Constitution and recommending new DOJ guidance on the Establishment Clause ^[14]. The administration has imposed personal sanctions on International Criminal Court judges investigating U.S. actions, with Secretary Rubio asserting the ICC "lacks authority" over the United States and its allies ^[15]. And the reclassification of 8,000 senior federal employees as at-will workers removes the civil service protections that have defined the boundary between political loyalty and professional expertise since the Pendleton Act era. Courts have blocked some of these actions. Federal judges have repeatedly struck down executive orders on voter data, mail-in voting, and Postal Service authority ^[16]. The Supreme Court has rejected the administration's tariff policy, blocked National Guard deployment against anti-ICE protests, and struck down the birthright citizenship order ^[17]. But the administration's cases are succeeding less over time as they move from expedited emergency appeals to regular proceedings, where they face what the Solicitor General has called "more rigorous scrutiny." The pattern advances wherever the judiciary allows, and it adapts when blocked: after the birthright citizenship ruling, Trump immediately pivoted to legislative action. In April, the V-Dem Institute, an independent democracy-monitoring project based in Sweden, reclassified the United States from a "liberal democracy" to an "electoral democracy," with democratic standards regressed to 1965 levels ^[18]. The institute uses different evidence, different methods, and a different vocabulary than any domestic observer. It reached the same conclusion: the cumulative effect of these actions is a category change in the nature of the state, not a policy shift. The evidence establishes a pattern and a shared method. It does not establish a signed plan. No document has emerged showing centralized coordination across the ESA, the park exhibits, the civil service, the church-state commission, and the ICC sanctions. But a pattern this consistent — the same framing, the same definitional target, the same rhetorical move — produces a category change whether or not anyone wrote it down. The definitions accumulate into a state. Remove enough of them, and the state is something else.