The Insidious Plan to Destroy Our National Monuments

Without the Antiquities Act, the Grand Canyon would be a strip mine. And now all of our national monuments are threatened.

Last month, the Heritage Foundation—a rightwing think tank—released Project 2025, a comprehensive blueprint that would guide the policy transition for a potential second Donald Trump presidency—including public lands management. The document maps out a plan to gut the Antiquities Act, which would allow the government to turn some of our most scenic and important public lands over to energy extraction interests.

The plan involves a two-pronged judicial and executive attack: The first will involve bringing a case in front of the Supreme Court designed to weaken the use of the Antiquities Act to preserve large swaths of land. The second would involve placing high ranking appointees in the Department of Interior, like Ryan Zinke and William Perry Pendley under the first Trump presidency, who would be amenable to leasing or selling large portions of public lands to energy companies.

You may be wondering, what is the Antiquities Act? The Act was signed on June 8, 1906, granting Presidents the power to protect cultural or natural resources of special historic or scientific interest by declaring them national monuments. The federal government manages 640 million acres of public land on your behalf, and for over a century, presidents have added significant levels of protection to some of the most important parts of that land using the Antiquities Act.

The first use of the Act came in September 1906, when Teddy Roosevelt created Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. In 1908, he established the Grand Canyon National Monument, covering 800,120 acres in Arizona. Legal challenges began immediately.

Local businessman Ralph H. Cameron owned 20 acres annexed by the Monument, and refused to vacate them, taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court. Crucially, Cameron’s challenge argued that the designation did not meet the requirement in the Act for Monuments to be, “limited to the smallest area compatible with the care and management of the objects to be protected.”

In 1920, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Cameron’s challenge, finding that the scale of the Grand Canyon itself justified the Monument’s size. That decision established a precedent that still stands today, granting presidents wide discretion in executing the powers granted to them by Congress.

Today, many of our nation’s most important landscapes are protected under the Antiquities Act, or, like the Grand Canyon, have become national parks after first being declared Monuments. Teddy Roosevelt went on to establish 16 more national monuments. His distant cousin Franklin created nine, including what is now Joshua Tree National Park.

Famously, Jimmy Carter used the Act to protect 56 million acres of public land in Alaska in a move that was so controversial at the time that Alaskans burned effigies of him in the street, but is now responsible for much of that state’s economic activity. Bill Clinton created 19 national monuments, George W. Bush is responsible for six, and Barack Obama established 26, including the 1.3 million acre Bears Ears and 582,578 square mile Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii.

Increasingly, presidents have been using the Antiquities Act to protect areas from oil and gas drilling, coal mining, and other forms of extraction.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, who in 2017 ordered then Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review all Monument designations made since 2006 that were over 100,000 acres in size.

That led to a Trump order shrinking Bears Ears down to about 228,000 acres—15 percent of its original size—and the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from the 1.9 million acres originally designated by President Clinton to just 1 million acres. This was the largest reversal in public land protections in U.S. history, and was done specifically to benefit energy extraction.

Much controversy ensued, Outside did a good job of covering it, and President Biden restored both monuments, while slightly expanding the borders of Bears Ears in 2021.

All caught up? Good, because now we can start talking about far right groups like the Heritage Foundation and Trump transition team’s plans not only to finish what they started, but to go after the ability for future presidents to designate national monuments altogether.

Around the time that Biden was working to restore the two monuments in Utah, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts wrote a four-page public letter heavily critical of interpretations of the Antiquities Act that allowed Presidents to protect large areas, specifically revisiting the “smallest area” provision.

“Somewhere along the line, however, this restriction has ceased to pose any meaningful restraint,” Roberts wrote in the 2021 letter. “A statute permitting the President in his sole discretion to designate as monuments ‘land-marks,’ ‘structures,’ AND ‘objects’—along with the smallest area of land compatible with their management—has been transformed into a power without any discernible limit to set aside vast and amorphous expanses of terrain above and below the sea.”

Roberts went on to identify several lawsuits in lower courts at the time that might provide a good challenge to the 1920 precedent allowing for large monuments, and suggested the court was looking for “better opportunities” to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act.

Since Trump appointed three far-right justices to the court during his term, the Supreme Court has taken what the Brennan Center for Justice describes as an “activist” approach to pursuing a regressive agenda. That means it now actively seeks out cases to hear that might allow it to issue rulings that provide predetermined outcomes in line with that agenda. In short, the court has become political, and is helping advance the far right agenda through a branch of government insulated from the will and actions of voters.

We saw that same mechanism used to curtail abortion rights, when Justice Antonin Scalia wrote opinions about cases that sought to chip away at women’s access to healthcare, essentially asking someone to bring a case before the court in such a manner that a ruling on the outright legality of Roe v. Wade could be considered. The court found that case in 2022 with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, allowing the far right majority to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion. Now that same majority has indicated it’s looking for a case broad enough that they can take sweeping action on the Antiquities Act.

This March, the Supreme Court declined to hear two cases from Oregon’s logging industry challenging the application of the Antiquities Act in that state. While it may sound counterintuitive that a court looking for an opportunity to issue a predetermined ruling on something would reject such cases, the two cases brought in March challenged a specific conflict with another law applicable only in Oregon. So, a ruling on them may only have applied in that state, rather than nationally. Which, a far right political operative explains, simply didn’t go far enough to get the court to the ruling Roberts has indicated he’s hoping to make.

“Chief Justice Roberts has made it quite clear he has some concerns about [the Antiquities Act] and its abuse,” stated William Perry Pendley, one of the headline authors of Project 2025, in March. “The court wants to meet whatever [question] it’s looking for, and it appears this wasn’t it.”

All the court needs in order to gut the Antiquities Act is a case with a large enough scope that it would justify such a ruling.

It’s notable and relevant to hear that explanation from Pendley, who served in a fluctuating capacity in the Department of the Interior during the Trump administration that was eventually ruled illegal. When he’s not attempting to hold government office, Pendley works as a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry, and moonlights as a writer, authoring all manner of controversial op-eds that deny climate change and are often considered racist, among other fun topics. Pendley is arguably the nation’s leading advocate for the mass sell-off of public lands.

“The new Administration must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906,” Pendley writes in his 28-page chapter of Project 2025. He goes on to describe Trump’s actions to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as “insufficient,” and suggests that actions taken around Monuments during a second Trump term be specifically directed to result in a Supreme Court case centered on a president’s authority to protect land—the same case Roberts says he’d like to see brought before the court.

Pendley disparages what he calls “Biden’s war on fossil fuels,” and says the President’s policies have resulted in, “dire adverse national impact.”

But Pendley’s track record on telling the truth isn’t exactly stellar. Even while Biden has used the Antiquities act to restore those two monuments in Utah, and also establish five new ones and expand two more, he’s also grown domestic production of oil and gas to record levels.

So what is the right complaining about? Biden’s energy record has resulted in massive new energy exports, never-before-seen levels of compensation for oil and gas executives, paid shareholders record dividends, and created a booming market for jobs in the energy sector—sounds like a far-right dream. This administration has proven that new and expanded national monuments can coexist with extraction.

“The [Trump] Administration’s review will permit a fresh look at past monument decrees and new ones by President Biden,” suggests Pendley, in his policy proposal, indicating that he’s not just looking to prevent the creation of future monuments, but possibly to reduce or eliminate existing national monuments, too.

But if Chief Justice Roberts gets his way, it may not even take a Trump victory to achieve that.