US Coast Guard and Florida start using Gulf of America for Gulf of Mexico

The US Coast Guard (USCG) and the state of Florida have started referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America – a new label pushed by Donald Trump – despite the name of the body of water not yet being formally changed.

On Tuesday, following a flurry of executive orders signed by Trump on his first days in office, the USCG announced that it would deploy additional assets to multiple locations, including the “maritime border between Texas and Mexico in the ‘Gulf of America’”. Similarly, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, cited the new moniker in a winter storm executive order on Monday, saying “an area of low pressure [was] moving across the Gulf of America”.

The USCG and Florida’s relabeling of the Gulf of Mexico follows Trump’s executive order on Monday upon taking office that claimed renaming the maritime basin would honor “American greatness”.

“President Trump is bringing common sense to government and renewing the pillars of American civilization,” the executive order said, adding: “The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America.”

Under the order, the secretary of interior will be required to “take all appropriate action” to rename the 617,800 sq mile basin within 30 days. The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the federal database that stores the official names of places in the US and is part of US Geological Survey (USGS) agency within the Department of the Interior, will also be required to be updated to “reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS”.

The Guardian has reached out to the USCG and DeSantis’s office for comment.

Although there is no formal international protocol on naming maritime areas, Trump’s order would in theory be enough for the name change to take place across official documents used within the US. However, other countries would not be required to follow suit.

The US Board on Geographic Names, also part of the USGS, “discourages name changes unless there is a compelling reason”. The federal agency added: “Changing a name merely to correct or re-establish historical usage is not in and of itself a reason to change a name.”