By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, April 27 (Reuters) – The White House has withdrawn President Donald Trump’s nomination of a hospitality company executive to be director of the National Park Service more than two months after sending the nomination to the U.S. Senate.
The White House did not give a reason for withdrawing the nomination of Scott Socha in its announcement on Monday.
Socha oversees the parks and resorts division of hospitality company Delaware North.
His nomination when announced in February was criticized by conservationists who had called him unqualified for the role over lack of experience in government.
Delaware North had sued the National Park Service in 2015 and eventually settled the lawsuit for $12 million in 2019 during Trump’s first term in office.
NPS is currently overseen by Jessica Bowron, who is the agency’s comptroller and acting director.
NPS is part of the U.S. Interior Department.
The Trump administration has attempted to reshape public spaces, museums and parks through steps that civil rights groups have widely condemned as undoing decades of social progress.
Trump signed an executive order weeks after taking office targeting what he said was the spread of “anti-American ideology.”
The order directed the Interior Department to restore federal parks, monuments and memorials that had been “removed or changed in the last years to perpetuate a false revision of history.”
The Interior Department said after the order that all national parks’ interpretive signage – the plaques and panels that explain sites and events – was under review.
The Washington Post has reported that U.S. officials have ordered national parks to remove dozens of signs and displays related to slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans by settlers.
In one such attempt where NPS staff removed a slavery exhibit in January from a Philadelphia historic site where George Washington once lived, a U.S. federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstall the slavery exhibit, a decision that NPS complied with.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington)
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