Trump Takes Aim At National Monuments — Again
The White House, in a chaotic announcement, said it would rescind Biden-era national monuments, but the executive order itself has not been released.
In the latest round of Friday evening executive orders and announcements, President Donald Trump signaled his intent to — once again — dismantle the boundaries of protected national monuments to open the door to drilling and other extraction.
A White House fact sheet noted that one of Trump’s executive actions would terminate "proclamations declaring nearly a million acres constitute new national monuments that lock up vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production."
The White House deleted the monument language from that document on Saturday. An accompanying executive order, titled "Additional Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders," which roughly matches the fact sheet's heading, makes no mention of national monuments, instead highlighting 16 other Biden-era executive actions on Trump’s chopping block.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it confirmed to the New York Times on Saturday that Trump rescinded Biden’s proclamation in January that created Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments in California. The two sites spanned a combined 850,000 acres.
It was not clear from the now-altered White House fact sheet whether the purported change would apply only to national monuments larger than 1 million acres, or whether it might refer to one or more specific national monuments, whose combined total acreage exceeds 1 million acres.
During his first term, Trump shrunk the boundaries of two sweeping monuments in Utah, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, by approximately 85% and 50%, respectively. It was the largest rollback of federal land protection in history.
Friday’s move comes as no surprise. The Trump administration previously indicated it was likely to roll back monument protections that shield millions of acres of public land from oil drilling, mining and other extractive industries.
During his confirmation hearing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum parroted a longstanding Republican talking point that recent administrations have abused the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate more than 160 monuments.
“Its original intention was really to protect, as it says, antiquities, areas like, I would say, Indiana Jones-type archeological protections,” Burgum said, ignoring that many early monuments, including those protecting the Grand Canyon and Washington’s Mount Olympus, spanned hundreds of thousands of acres.
More recently, in a secretarial order on “unleashing American energy” that he signed in early February, Burgum directed his assistant secretaries to “review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands,” including national monument designations and mineral bans.
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement Saturday that the Trump administration’s “lack of transparency and clarity around this latest attack on national monuments confirms what is already obvious: Americans need access to their public lands, and if they try to hand those lands over to Trump’s billionaire friends and foreign mining companies, they will be met with resistance across the West.”
Colorado College’s 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll found that 89% of voters in eight Western states oppose shrinking or removing protections for national monuments, up from 80% in 2017.
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