in effect
This is Executive Order 14189, signed January 29, 2025, ahead of the July 4, 2026 250th anniversary of American independence. It creates a White House task force to plan the anniversary celebration and directs several related actions, including reviving earlier orders about national monuments and a statue garden.
It creates the “White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday” (Task Force 250), chaired by the President with the Vice President as Vice Chair, staffed by named Cabinet secretaries and other officials, and housed and funded within the Department of Defense. Agencies had to report their celebration planning to the task force by March 1, 2025, and the task force is set to shut down on December 31, 2026 unless the President extends it. It reinstates three prior executive orders (13934, 13978, and 13933) that had been revoked in 2021, covering monument-building and monument-protection efforts. It directs officials to expand the planned “National Garden of American Heroes” to a total of 250 figures, and changes a deadline in an earlier order from “prior to the 250th anniversary” to “as expeditiously as possible.”
Federal departments and agencies—especially the named Cabinet secretaries and the Department of Defense—carry the work of planning, funding, reporting, and coordinating the celebration, alongside the separate U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission. The general public is the intended audience for the resulting anniversary events and monument projects. The order states it creates no legal rights or benefits that anyone can enforce in court.