Since President Trump returned to office, some of the nation’s best-known historic sites, from the White House’s ill-fated East Wing to the imperiled Kennedy Center, have come under attack, prompting preservationists to sue. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, has been a central player in these prominent cases.

Preservationists are gearing up for a prolonged legal fight to safeguard not only the landmarks themselves but the foundational protections of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), passed in 1966. The law was a response to the wave of urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s, including the controversial razing of New York City’s Penn Station, that wiped out historic buildings across the country. The National Trust’s president and CEO, Brent Leggs, calls today’s threats, which recall those of the past, “generational and existential.” 

They come alongside proposed changes to NHPA’s Section 106, which requires federal agencies to consider how the projects they undertake or fund could affect historic places and, critically, to give the public a chance to weigh in before a final decision is made.

In late September, at the 2026 National Preservation Summit, Leggs announced the Historic Preservation Defense Fund, a campaign to raise $10 million over the next three years to support the National Trust’s legal defense, public advocacy, and community action “where and when historic places are threatened,” he tells Fast Company.

These objectives fall in line with the National Trust’s mission. Congress chartered the organization in 1949 to give the public a say in decisions about the nation’s most important historic places.

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