YourVoice.Now Summary
EnvironmentCivil LibertiesTransparency & AccountabilityA national park code cleanup — typos fixed, two wrongly repealed laws revived, and battlefield land grants limited to willing sellers.
Environment
Sec. 6(n) adds "eligible sites" alongside "interests in" eligible sites throughout the battlefield grant program. Today a grant can pay for a partial right in historic ground; it could also pay for the ground itself.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund's own law names the wrong part of the tax code — the part that sends money to a boating and sport fish fund. Sec. 6(h)(2) points it instead at the boat fuel tax money meant for the park fund, capped at about $1 million a year.
Current law authorizes $18 million a year for fiscal years 2020 through 2028. Sec. 6(n)(7) changes the start year to 2025, so five already-finished years drop off the front. The 2028 end date is left alone.
Sec. 6(r)(2) writes back an offset the 2014 code move dropped. It takes $6.5 million off what Congress has authorized for Preserve America but has not yet handed out. Money already appropriated is untouched.
Civil Liberties
Sec. 6(n)(6) writes into the code that land bought with battlefield grants must come from owners who agree to sell. This is new law, not restored text — the older statute behind this program carried no such limit.
Transparency & Accountability
Sec. 6(n)(6) also bars any of this grant money from being used, directly or indirectly, to sway votes in Congress. Like the willing-seller rule, it is new — the older statute had no lobbying ban.
Sec. 6(a) undoes two repeals from the 2014 code move, backdated to December 19, 2014. One is a findings section of historic preservation law; the other is part of a 1970 parks authority.
More about this bill
Park visitors would notice nothing new on the ground. National park law was moved into its own part of the U.S. Code in 2014. That move left behind misspellings, broken cross-references, and a few rules wiped out by accident. Fixing them is the whole job here. Most of the cleanup is small. Words like "Acquistion" and "mimimum" get spelled right. Purpose statements come back for park staff housing and park shuttle programs. They return for city park grants and the Underground Railroad program. Two pieces of law repealed by mistake would come back, dated as if they had never gone. Old park acts going back to 1896 would be repealed, but rights and cases already underway would stand. A few pieces carry real weight. Grants that buy Civil War battlefield land could buy whole sites, not just partial rights in them. Those purchases could only come from owners willing to sell. None of that grant money could pay for lobbying Congress. The funding line for those grants would read 2025 through 2028, at $18 million a year. That drops five already-past years off the front. The 2028 end date does not move. The law behind the Land and Water Conservation Fund would point at the tax money that actually feeds it. The spending limit for Preserve America would drop by $6.5 million. Money from scrapping old federal ships would reach maritime heritage grants from one more source.
Congressional Summary
Congress's official summary of this bill still describes an earlier version of the text, so we have left it out here. You can read it on Congress.gov.
Details
- Congress
- 119th
- Chamber
- House
- Status
- summarized
- Action
- Passed House
- Action Date
- 2026-08-31
- Date Added
- 2026-08-26
- Source
- Congress.gov →
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