AN EXHIBIT about nine people kept as slaves by founding US president George Washington must be returned to his former home in Philadelphia after President Donald Trump’s administration took it down last month, a federal judge has ruled.

The decision by US District Judge Cynthia Rufe came on Presidents’ Day, the federal holiday honouring Washington’s legacy.

Philadelphia’s authorities sued in January after the National Park Service removed the explanatory panels from Independence National Historical Park, the site where George and Martha Washington lived with nine of their slaves in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the US capital.

A Trump executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks prompted the panels’ removal. 

The order directed the Interior Department to ensure those sites do not display elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

But Ms Rufe ruled on Monday that all the materials must be restored in their original condition while a lawsuit challenging the removal’s legality plays out. 

She prohibited federal officials from installing replacements that explain the history differently.

The judge, appointed by Republican president George W Bush, began her written order with a quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984 and compared the Trump administration to the Ministry of Truth that forms part of the book’s totalitarian regime.

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘ignorance is strength,’ this court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Ms Rufe wrote. “It does not.”

She warned Justice Department lawyers during a January hearing that they were making “dangerous” and “horrifying” statements when they claimed that Trump officials can choose which parts of US history to display at National Park Service sites.

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.