Of all the things the Trump administration has done, maybe rewriting the guidelines for the architecture of federal buildings doesn’t seem as high-impact as, say, putting kids in border camps or failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the relationship between a government and the built environment is as important, physically, as the one it has to the natural one. The buildings in which governing takes place are also representative of that governing.

So the scoop last week saying that the feds’ plan to switch all federal architecture to “classical”—like a Greek temple, basically—might be one of the most blatantly authoritarian things the government has yet attempted.

According to a draft executive order obtained by Cathleen McGuigan, editor of Architectural Record, the General Services Administration—the arm of the executive branch that runs the real estate—is planning to discard its half-century-old philosophy for designing federal buildings. No more big-shot contemporary architects designing weirdo courthouses. No more Morphosis designing a sandcrawler-esque San Francisco Federal Building or Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects building a stripes-and-cutouts cube for a US courthouse in Austin. On Wednesday the Chicago Sun-Times posted the actual memo, titled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” It mandates new architectural review panels, specifically bans brutalism and deconstructivism as architectural styles, and calls for new buildings to have a look “derived from the forms and principles of classical Roman and Greek architecture, and as later employed by such Renaissance architects as Michelangelo and Palladio.” The GSA’s famous Design Excellence Program, which since 1994 has tried to put contemporary art and architecture into government, will itself be deconstructed.

McGuigan also reports that David Insinga, the GSA’s chief architect and head of the Design Excellence Program, has resigned. The GSA’s press office declined to confirm this, referring me instead to the White House.

The guidelines for federal architecture date back to a 1962 report to President John F. Kennedy. A memo by a young staffer named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture,” laid down the new ideas for the New Frontier. Federal buildings had to pay “visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government,” but they should also “embody the finest contemporary American architectural thought.” Perhaps most importantly, Moynihan wrote that there’d be no “national style.” Nothing mandated. Designs would be fresh, new, regional, authentic—democratic, even.

As Karen Patricia Heath wrote in a 2017 article on the principles, government architecture had until that point been content to let form follow function, hard. They were pragmatic and not showy. But in the 19th century, neoclassicism was a dominant style overall, especially for institutions that wanted to convey stolidity and reliability by alluding to the beginnings of (European) civilization, as McGuigan also writes. It made sense that the US government would use it in Washington, DC, and for monuments. Heath writes that Kennedy didn’t care much about culture, but his advisers and his elite base did, and the idea of turning federal buildings into a showcase for American art and architecture fit with the whole Camelot thing. Moynihan went on to become a UN ambassador and senator from New York. His guiding principles became the central narrative of the GSA and a kind of polestar for US architects.