Why Biden administration renamed 650 geographic features

Claim:

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the administration updated the names of roughly 650 geographic locations.

Rating:

Context

This talking point surfaced amid pushback against Donald Trump’s executive directives altering well-known landmarks like the Gulf of Mexico, Denali, and Lake Ontario. However, the comparison relies on a false equivalence. Back in 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland initiated the renaming of approximately 650 sites specifically to purge them of a derogatory racial slur targeting Native American women.

Throughout his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has issued executive directives instructing the Department of the Interior, alongside the Board on Geographic Names, to rebrand several prominent landmarks:

1. Changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America
2. Renaming Denali back to Mount McKinley, reverting the official title previously held by North America’s tallest peak from 1917 to 2015
3. Switching Lake Ontario to Lake America

These directives quickly sparked international pushback, drawing sharp criticism from foreign officials and domestic figures alike.

In response, various social media users pointed out that the previous administration under Joe Biden carried out a sweeping administrative update of its own, officially changing the names of about 650 geographic features. Proponents of this argument claimed the comparison highlights a double standard in public reactions to presidential rebrandings.

An investigation into the matter reveals that while the core statistic is accurate, drawing a direct parallel between the two actions is misleading.

The Biden-administration initiative, spearheaded by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, focused entirely on a single objective: eliminating offensive geographical titles containing a slur demeaning Native American women. Trump’s orders, on the other hand, targeted massive, globally recognized landmarks—including major bodies of water that are shared with or located adjacent to other nations.

When launching the initiative in November 2021, the Interior Department noted that historical precedents existed for such housekeeping measures, pointing to 1962 and 1974 orders that removed explicit racial and ethnic slurs from federal maps.

By September 2022, the department officially confirmed that the Board on Geographic Names had cleared the final batch of updated designations, releasing a comprehensive inventory of the roughly 650 modified locations.

Aside from Olympic Valley, California—the historic site of the 1960 Winter Olympics—virtually none of the locations adjusted during the Biden administration possessed the major national or international prominence associated with places like the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, or Denali.

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