J.D. Tuccille: Trump shouldn’t have the authority to rename Lake Ontario

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In an odd way, U.S. President Donald Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America demonstrates the limits of his power. Yes, Trump elicited the annoyed responses he hoped for from Canadian politicians. But the renaming is a symbolic gesture that binds only U.S. federal agencies. State governments and private entities in the U.S. can’t be required to use federal place names, and the order has even less clout beyond America’s borders. Relatively impotent though it is, renaming a body of water shared with another country is one of the few ways the president can provoke neighbors without risking a courtroom slap-down, as he’s received over tariffs. It’s still more power than a president should have.

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In his Aug. 27 executive order, President Trump directed that “(w)ithin 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior (Secretary) shall, in coordination with the Board on Geographic Names and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, take all appropriate actions to rename as ‘Lake America’ the body of water currently named as Lake Ontario.”

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Sure enough, the secretary of the interior followed up with a directive “to immediately rename Lake Ontario to Lake America and to update the Geographic Names Information System to appropriately reflect the change.”

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President Trump’s move came after the recent collapse of trade talks and amidst much cross-border verbal sniping by members of his administration and Canadian officials. Trump didn’t get what he wanted in the abortive talks, which was essentially U.S. government-managed commerce between the people of the two countries. He did, however, get a sought-for rise out of politicians north of the border.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney quickly assured Canadians that they would continue to call the body of water “Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford shelled out taxpayer money to erect a sign vowing the body would be “Lake Ontario now and always.”

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It turns out that, as much as the power of the U.S. presidency has grown beyond the bounds envisioned by the country’s founders, the office still operates within limits. Even in the era of what scholar Gene Healy called The Cult of the Presidency in his book by that name, presidential orders apply only to the executive branch. Affected federal agencies have wide, but finite reach.

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According to a U.S. Geological Survey discussion of the limits of the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), “Federal agencies must use GNIS for the publication of map, products or other services. The decisions of the Board on Geographic Names (BGN) are only binding to federal departments and agencies. A state may maintain its own names database or have other policies that govern state map production, but typically and for consistency, they use the names in GNIS. Private mapping companies (e.g., Google Maps, Apple Maps, Esri) also use GNIS but are not required to do so.”