The order changes the name used by United States federal agencies. It directs the Secretary of the Interior to coordinate with the US Board on Geographic Names, the body that standardises geographic names for federal use, and to have the Geographic Names Information System updated so that federal maps, contracts and official documents read Lake America. The reasoning offered in the order is that the deepest parts of the lake lie within United States territory, that the United States therefore claims most of its volume, and that the lake has been central to American exploration, settlement, commerce and defence. What the order cannot do is bind Canada. A lake that forms an international boundary is named twice, once in each country's records, and there is no mechanism by which one government's naming decision reaches into another's. The practical outcome is a single body of water carrying two official names.

The significance of this order is not cartographic. It follows the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and it lands during a period of strained United States-Canada trade relations after negotiations between the two failed. Canada's objection was made on historical grounds: Prime Minister Mark Carney pointed out that the name Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari'io, meaning that the lake is beautiful and large, and predates the founding of both countries. For an examinee the transferable lesson is about the limits of unilateral toponymy - a state can control its own records completely and other states' records not at all, which is why disputed place names typically persist in parallel rather than being resolved.