We Can Still Call it the Gulf of Mexico

But also, for Ron DeSantis, and everyone else, it’s still the Gulf of Mexico. Trump’s executive order directs the Secretary of the Interior, within 30 days, to “take all appropriate actions to rename” the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Typically, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is the entity that weighs this decision. Anyone can make recommendations to the Board on name changes, and its members are supposed to take into account the case for renaming a place. According to the Board’s website, “the most important consideration is local use and acceptance.” 

Ultimately, the Secretary of Interior can have the final say; this is what happened in 2015, when Mount McKinley formally became Denali. Alaska had asked for this change since 1975, but the Ohio congressional delegation objected, including blocking legislation to rename it, and the U.S. Board of Geographic Names tried to stay out of it until that was resolved. Then-Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell finally broke the deadlock, though Ohio Republicans complained about the executive branch doing this without an act of Congress. 

Alaska’s senators have now objected to Trump changing the name of the peak to McKinley again, but it seems less likely the Board will defer to Congress this time. The Board is staffed by representatives of different federal agencies, and Trump’s executive order directs those agencies to name new people to those posts. On Friday, the Department of the Interior released a statement that said it “remains committed to upholding all aspects of President Trump’s executive order, ensuring that the names we use reflect the values, sacrifices, and accomplishments that define our Nation.” So even the toponymy nerds are going to have to be Trump loyalists now. 

As for the Gulf of America, no one has really objected to it because it’s quite stupid. Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, has basically said that Trump can call it whatever he wants. “For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said this week.

Which is true. The Board’s name changes are only binding for the federal government and its agencies. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is the international agency that maps oceans, seas, and other big bodies of water, and works with the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names to standardize the names of maritime and undersea features.

John Rennie Short, a professor emeritus in geography at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County said the IHO “is a slow-moving body that does not respond to public pressure from just one country.” It has struggled with far more contentious political naming disputes, so that even if the White House were to formally petition for a name change, “it is unlikely to be changed anytime soon around the world,” Short said in an email. 

So everyone else can, and probably will, can keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico. It will ultimately be up to each federal agency and office to change their signage and website, based on their budgets and schedules. Splinter tried to reach out to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to find out how cost-effective it is to allocate money to perhaps updating federal documents and maps to reflect the change. DOGE apparently has a website, but no press contact, so we messaged them on X, and no one responded to the inquiry.

Probably the extent of this drama is that Trump will get to talk about the big, beautiful “Gulf of America” while running Sharpies over a hurricane map, or something. But Trump publicly talked about this “Gulf of America” thing in a press conference a few weeks ago, where he also mused about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal. No one really knew how serious he was about any of it, but he did just do one of the things he said he was going to do, even if it was the lowest-stakes promise on that list.