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An appeals court ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration can reinstall interpretive panels that critics say whitewash the history of slavery at the site of President George Washington’s home in Philadelphia.

The signs would be in the same area where the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. A message seeking comment was left Friday with the National Park Service.

The new educational panels were designed to replace ones put up in 2010 that told the story of how nine slaves lived in the home along with George and Martha Washington in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital.

Their removal stemmed from Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for federally owned or controlled historic sites not to display information to “disparage Americans past or living” and to focus on the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

Friday’s ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. 3rd Circuit of Appeals, which is based in a courthouse across an intersection from the President’s House site, was a technical one to allow implementation of a ruling made last month.

That ruling — by one judge Trump nominated, one nominated by former President George W. Bush and one chosen by former President Barack Obama — said a lower court was wrong to force the federal government to take down its new panels.

The government asked Thursday for the go-ahead to put them back up, saying that the panels were ready to install and that they should go up “without further delay.” The administration has said in court filings that its information also discusses slavery.

Advocates, academics and officials have been concerned for months that the version that complies with Trump’s order could give a history that downplays the pain in the nation’s past in favor of a more triumphant view.

A government website with images of the new panels shows they would still have information on enslaved people who lived in the home, plus details on the abolitionist movement, how the Constitution treated slavery, the end of slavery in Pennsylvania and how Washington and his successor, John Adams, viewed and treated slavery, as well as information about the 20th century Civil Rights movement. The replacement panels do not include some of detail in the earlier ones, such as a map of slave trade routes and a timeline on slavery. They also avoid critical headlines such as “The Dirty Business of Slavery.”

The City of Philadelphia, which sued over removal of the previous information, is trying to put the brakes on the new installation. The city on Friday asked the appeals court to recall its order from earlier in the day — at least long enough to allow the city to respond to the request Trump’s administration made on Thursday.

Philadelphia said in its filing that it would be hurt if the new panels go back up: “The President’s House is a site of exceptional importance to Philadelphia and the Nation, developed through years of federal-local collaboration to tell a historically significant and long-suppressed story.”

About half the previous panels were reinstalled earlier this year before a court ordered that work to stop.

Federal safety investigators said in a new preliminary report that they found no indication that engine failure caused the fiery crash of a plane on a skydiving outing last month in Missouri that killed all 12 people aboard, including several very experienced jumpers.

The report issued Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board also did not flag any other serious safety or mechanical failures that could have led to the crash, which happened just after takeoff on a clear day.

The NTSB released the findings based on initial inspections of the badly damaged wreckage and flight records. The report said there were no indications of any precrash mechanical malfunctions or failures in the engine that would have prevented the normal operation of the plane.

In fact, NTSB said it appeared that the engine of the single-engine turboprop plane had been producing power at the time of the crash.

“I was surprised that they had determined that the engine was producing power,” said Jeff Guzzetti, president of Guzzetti Aviation Risk Discovery, an aviation safety consultancy. “Initially I thought it smacked of a potential engine problem and that the pilot had been trying to return to the airport.”

The federal agency also said a post-accident sample from the fuel truck found the fuel to be free of sediment or debris, and a review of the skydiving business operators’ software showed that the airplane had met the weight and balance limitations for the flight.

The report raised no concerns about the weather or the pilot, who had accumulated over 4,100 total flight hours and was in his second consecutive jump season working for the operator, Skydive Kansas City.

The airplane was not equipped with a crashworthy voice or data recorder, like those that record flight data on commercial planes, nor was it required to be, investigators said. The NTSB report did note, however, that its investigators had recovered damaged GoPro cameras from the wreckage.

The federal agency’s investigation into the accident was ongoing, and a final report often takes a year or more to complete.

The June 14 crash happened about an hour south of Kansas City, when the Pacific Aerospace 750XL carrying a pilot and 11 skydivers took off from Butler Memorial Airport at 11:25 a.m. on a clear day.

During the initial climb, the airplane began a gradual turn to the left, with both wings eventually becoming almost perpendicular to the ground before it slammed into a field, nose down, and burst into flames, investigators said.

The straight up-and-down position of the wings meant they could no longer produce enough aerodynamic lift to keep the plane in the air and the NTSB will have to figure out why that happened, Guzzetti said.

The fire inflicted significant damage to the aircraft’s major structural components, as well as the cockpit, the cabin and the fuel system, investigators said.

Some family members of those who died were at the airport to watch the jump and witnessed the crash, authorities said. The United States Parachute Association, skydiving’s governing body, said its technology director, Jen Sharp, was among those killed.

Skydive Kansas City called the crash a “devastating loss.”

Poor maintenance is often a factor when skydiving planes crash and the NTSB has previously raised concerns about the weak oversight for skydiving operators in past crash investigations. The agency said after a 2019 crash that killed 11 people in Hawaii that the FAA’s regulatory system isn’t strong enough to ensure the safety of skydiving flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration has yet to adopt the NTSB’s recommendations, but said it established a committee in April that will recommend ways to increase skydiving safety and will consider the safety board’s proposals.

The United States Parachute Association said that Skydive Kansas City adheres to the safety standards set by the largest skydiving organization in the world, including all FAA maintenance requirements. The skydiving industry says it has a strong safety record. The association said that last year nearly 3.5 million jumps were completed and that 16 civilians died, the majority from human error.

The plane that crashed was built in 2010, according to FAA records. It made two successful flights the morning of the crash, the NTSB said. It is popular for skydiving and certified to be operated by a single pilot.

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Follow Marc Levy at http://twitter.com/timelywriter

HOPKINTON, R.I. (AP) — At Ashawaug Farm in southwest Rhode Island, Dawn and Cassius Spears preserve their Indigenous knowledge of agriculture through the cultivation and keeping of three Narragansett heritage crops: white corn, succotash beans and crookneck squash.

They would like to expand their farm’s reach beyond their farm stand, but it’s challenging. Like many small food producers, the Spears have sought financial assistance through federal programs. Some have been cut or significantly scaled back under the Trump Administration, including U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that helped tribal farmers.

Tribes relied on these programs to grow and distribute culturally-significant foods locally.

“When we go into these federal programs, we’re hoping that they’ll last long enough,” Cassius Spears said. “They usually start out with a good song and dance. And they’re going to last a long time. And then something happens where they get cut.”

Programs help state and tribal governments purchase local food

The Biden administration started two programs during the pandemic to help states and tribes purchase local food from nearby farmers for food banks and schools: the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA) and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program (LFS). These programs offered farmers, including tribal farmers, reliable markets for their products. Tribal governments received assistance to purchase food from local producers to distribute to tribal members.

This allowed tribes to get federal dollars directly to small-scale producers, said Carly Griffith Hotvedt, executive director of the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative and a member of Cherokee Nation. The Spears’ farm provided food for a tribal farm in nearby Connecticut that used LFPA funds, after an agreement was signed in August 2022.

In some instances, tribes used those dollars to source culturally-significant foods for tribal members such as bison meat, certain types of berries and wild rice that were included as part of a food box distribution. For some low-income tribal members, it was the best way to access these types of foods, Hotvedt said.

“It wasn’t just commodity foods in that box. It was highly local, traditionally relevant, culturally relevant foods that were included,” Hotvedt said.

In March 2025, under the Trump administration, the Agriculture Department ended the two programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks, saying that they no longer aligned with the agency’s goals.

Congress considers new funding for farmers

U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, and Sen. Jim Justice, a West Virginia Republican, introduced a bill they say takes the best from the two programs and creates a permanent grant program. It would allow state and tribal governments to buy local foods from local and regional producers to distribute to nearby hunger relief programs and schools.

Reed said he feared that when the USDA programs were cut, families across the country would have a more difficult time getting access to food. And, he said, the access wouldn’t be to nutritious, freshly grown produce.

Reed said he’s hoping to get the legislation passed as part of the Farm Bill, the massive, multi-year law that governs agricultural and food programs. The House passed its version of the bill in April, and a Senate committee released its draft in late June. The House version also includes a bipartisan proposal for a permanent program modeled after the Local Food Purchase Assistance program. It would allow states, through the USDA, to establish cooperative agreements connecting local farmers and producers with local food distribution organizations.

Both proposals would set aside 10% of the program’s funding for tribes.

For a new program to succeed, Congress must include mandatory funding in order to help farmers better plan, purchase supplies and hire staff because they know they’re going to sell products through those programs, said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The House version would require Congress to agree on funding annually, she added.

Reed said he’s advocating for mandatory funding in the Senate because without it very little is funded these days, and because farms are under so much pressure economically. An optional program wouldn’t help them as much, he said.

“We really want to punch through the existing obstacles for small farmers and Native American farmers,” he said.

Teaching the next generation about where food comes from

Dawn and Cassius Spears would like to see Indigenous producers prioritized when tribal entities purchase food. And they said they think having dedicated programs that Indigenous producers can access outside of their tribal government would help more Indigenous producers.

Under the canopy of one of her farm’s high tunnels at the start of this year’s planting season, Dawn Spears carefully organized her tomato crop, separating the tiny plants before moving them to a field outside. The name of the 6-acre farm is an homage to the Narragansett name of the river that flows through town. It started as a small community garden and food sovereignty project.

One of her grandsons, 9-year-old Giizhig, walked in to ask if she needed help.

“Only if you want to,” Spears replied. “It’s always good to know how to do it, right?”

Teaching the next generation about where food comes from and how to grow responsibly is key for her. But her culture isn’t just about cultivating crops. It’s also about gathering foods they eat from the wild and being able to preserve and access land where those foods are.

She’s working to protect the land around their farm as development grows with the hope of introducing native plants into that area that can be foraged for food. Federal funding programs can also help with securing access to land, she said.

“If you take a person away from the land that they come from, then it’s like they’re not whole,” she said. “We have to eat the food that’s naturally from that space that we come from.”

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McDermott reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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Follow Joshua A. Bickel on Instagram, Bluesky and X @joshuabickel.

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