President Trump remains, as ever, laser-focused on the things that really matter to Americans: renaming things on the map after America, or himself. The latest victim is Lake Ontario, renamed by executive order on Aug. 27 after a breakdown in trade talks with Canada left Trump saying the U.S. doesn’t “expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.” The petulance would be one thing if it were free. But of course it isn’t.
Newsweek explains:
A useful comparison comes from the CBO concerning the “Gulf of America” change, adopted on the first day of Trump’s second term. In analysis of a bill aimed at codifying the January 20 executive order, the nonpartisan agency said that it would cost up to $500,000 over five years to update all necessary federal documents and maps. During debates in May, however, Democrats on the House Rules Committee noted that there would also be major associated outlays for the nation’s schools and municipal services.
At the state level, New York, the only state with a shoreline on Lake Ontario, has no plans to implement any changes following Trump’s order. But Michael C. Dorf, a professor of law at Cornell, writes that the change could still burden the Empire State, as it will be forced “to take expensive steps in coordinating state and federal programs, training personnel, and alerting the public to the fact that ‘Lake America’ and ‘Lake Ontario’ refer to the same body of water.”
And, beyond replacing signage, Mike Shriberg, director of the University of Michigan’s Water Center, offered an analysis for the environmental website Circle of Blue, in which he estimated that the change would disrupt decades of environmental data sets and scientific collaboration, while costing agencies and researchers millions of dollars. “The important question, it seems to me, is whether there is any substantive benefit to a given name change,” said Joyce. [Philip G. Joyce, a University of Maryland public-policy professor and former CBO analyst] He told Newsweek that any rebrand which fails to lower costs, improve government performance or offer citizens any “substantive benefit” would “represent the very definition of waste.”
New York, the state that actually borders the lake, isn’t even bothering to comply. And that’s before counting the mayor of Oswego, a Republican, who publicly refused to go along with it, citing “several thousand dollars” in costs his city of 17,000 can’t spare.
The public isn’t fooled by the “honoring American greatness” framing, either. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 14% of the country supports the change, versus 63% opposed, including a plurality of Republicans.
Some of you may remember that the mnemonic for the names of the five Great Lakes, Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior, used to be HOMES. With the new name for Lake Ontario, the only word that still works is SHAME.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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