Trump's order said that the proposed garden would be managed by the Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, which would allocate funding from the
Interior Department to establish the site. Members of the task force would include chairs of the
National Endowment for the Arts and
National Endowment for the Humanities, the
Administrator of General Services, the chair of the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and any additional "officers or employees of any executive department or agency" designated by the president. Trump described the garden as a response to the practice of
removing monuments and memorials; many such monuments were removed or destroyed in 2020 as part of a response to the
George Floyd protests. Under Trump's Executive Order 13934, issued July 3, 2020, the task force was granted 60 days to develop preliminary plans for the site, including a potential location, and was to open before July 4, 2026, the
250th anniversary of the adoption of the
Declaration of Independence. That revised list included 192 men and 52 women. In 2021, the garden was considered highly unlikely to ever be built, and
Congress never appropriated any funds for the project. On May 14, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that revoked both of Trump's executive orders on the Garden, as well as various other Trump-issued executive orders. On January 29, 2025, Trump revoked Biden's executive order related to the garden and called for six additional names to be added to the list of historical figures. The timeline of its construction was modified from July 4, 2026, to "as expeditiously as possible".
Vince Haley, chair of the
Domestic Policy Council, would be responsible for selecting the final list of 250 subjects. In April 2025, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced it would sponsor grants to artists for the planned works, in a joint effort with the National Endowment for the Arts.
Funding and legislative authorization In April 2025, the
National Endowment for the Humanities announced a grant program of $200,000 per statue paid for in part by canceled grants for other arts and humanities projects by Elon Musk's
Department of Government Efficiency. It directed that statues were portrayed in a "realistic manner," with no modernist or abstract designs allowed. The Executive Order mandated further that the work must be "in the classical style, lifelike, and created from marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass,". In May 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a comprehensive budget reconciliation package. Section 86001 of the bill appropriates $40 million to the Department of the Interior to establish and maintain the National Garden of American Heroes. The bill's passage marked the first congressional funding for the garden, which had previously been authorized solely through executive orders during President Trump's first term. ==Reception==