Preserving Great Americans’ Legacies Act of 2025

Preserving Great Americans’ Legacies Act of 2025 would prevent the Secretary of the Navy from changing the names of any naval vessels that, as of the bill’s enactment, are named after specific individuals. The bill overrides the usual naming authority in Title 10 (10 U.S.C. § 8662(b)) for those particular ships, effectively guaranteeing that existing ship names honoring eight named individuals will remain unchanged. The listed individuals are Cesar Chavez, Medgar Evers, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dolores Huerta, Thurgood Marshall, Harvey Milk, Lucy Stone, and Harriet Tubman. The measure is narrowly tailored to protect current names and does not appear to address future naming decisions for new ships or other potential renamings. In plain terms, if a naval vessel is already named after one of the eight people when this law becomes law, that name cannot be changed. It does not, however, automatically require naming ships after these figures in the future, nor does it broadly bar renaming other ships not named after these individuals.