A federal appeals court will let the Trump administration alter mentions of slavery at a historical site in Philadelphia, overruling a lower court judge who had blocked the effort.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said last week that new information panels prepared by the National Park Service “are full of historical context” and that Philadelphia could not challenge the decision under a federal rule-making law. The City couldn’t show that a final agency action that it could fight had yet occurred.

“Given all these developments, we cannot agree with the district court that the exhibit removal six months ago was NPS’s last word on the matter,” Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote.

The site is the President’s House, where presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived. Washington owned slaves there, and the NPS used crowbars to take down exhibits informing the public of their stories in January

President Trump’s 2025 executive order told the Department of the Interior to make sure national parks do not “contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times).”

But that contrasts with the mission of the President’s House. Philadelphia and the federal government agreed in 2006 to design a somewhat-restored version that tells the stories of those who were enslaved there under Washington.

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