Trump Orders Review To Strip Protections From National Monuments, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A 1906 Conservation Law Was Still Conserving Land

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration announced this week that it has directed the Department of the Interior to conduct a comprehensive review of the nation's national monuments, a process officials confirmed is intended to determine which protected landscapes can be reopened to mining, drilling, and logging, and which can be abolished outright.

The review targets monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a law signed by Theodore Roosevelt that has allowed presidents for 120 years to set aside federal land of scientific or historic value. Administration officials described the statute as a long-running structural flaw, noting that land protected under the Act has shown a persistent tendency to remain protected, in some cases indefinitely.

"For more than a century, this law has been quietly removing acreage from the productive economy and converting it into scenery," said one official within the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity because the policy is to say it on the record later. "A canyon that could be generating uranium royalties is instead just sitting there being a canyon. The President looked at that arrangement and asked a very reasonable question, which was why."

The review expands on first-term efforts. In December 2017, Trump shrank Utah's Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by roughly half, the largest reduction of public land protections in American history. The 2026 review goes further, examining whether a president may not only reduce a monument but eliminate it entirely, a power no president has previously claimed and which courts have never affirmed.

Interior officials said the review would weigh each monument against criteria including mineral potential, timber value, and proximity to energy infrastructure, with scenic, cultural, and ecological factors to be considered "where time permits." A second administration source said the objective was to ensure that no acre of federal land was being held in protection for a reason that could not be expressed in dollars.

Legal scholars noted that the Antiquities Act contains explicit language authorizing presidents to create monuments but none authorizing them to abolish one, a textual asymmetry the administration has characterized as an oversight by Congress that the executive branch is now prepared to correct on Congress's behalf.

At press time, the President was reviewing a map of the United States from which the green areas were being progressively removed.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who in his first term shrank two national monuments and in his second moved to claim the unprecedented power to abolish them outright.
§The uranium, oil, gas, and coal industries, whose interest in the mineral deposits beneath protected land predates the monuments by decades.
§The timber industry, positioned to reach forested acreage that monument status had placed off limits.
§Energy lessees and holders of mining claims adjacent to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and other monuments now under review.
§Utah's Republican congressional delegation and state officials, who campaigned for years to undo the original monument designations.
§Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, handed expanded authority over the disposition of hundreds of millions of acres of federal land.
§Future presidents of either party, who inherit a broadened theory of executive power over public lands once the precedent is set.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment