Trump Justice Department Declares That The Power To Create National Monuments Includes The Power To Abolish Them, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Protected Land Might Remain Protected

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel released a legal opinion this week concluding that the President possesses the authority not merely to shrink but to abolish outright the national monuments designated by his predecessors, resolving a long-standing concern that land set aside for permanent protection might turn out to be permanently protected.

The opinion, authored by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit and dated May 27 before its public release, disavowed a 1938 opinion by then-Attorney General Homer Cummings, which had held that the Antiquities Act of 1906 grants presidents the power to create monuments but not to undo them. Reasoning that, in the words of the memo, "the power to declare carries with it the power to revoke," the department resolved eighty-seven years of settled interpretation over the course of a single afternoon.

The Antiquities Act, signed by Theodore Roosevelt to keep landscapes and antiquities out of private hands, was found on review to have also preserved the option of placing them back into private hands. Officials clarified that a statute written to protect land had, all along, quietly contained the latent authority to deliver that land to whoever wished to dig beneath it.

The opinion arrived as the administration weighed revoking protections for at least six monuments, among them California's Chuckwalla and Sattitla Highlands, Utah's Bears Ears, and the Grand Canyon-adjacent Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni, a list officials confirmed had been narrowed by careful attention to which sites sat atop extractable minerals. "A monument is just land that hasn't been reconsidered yet," said one source within the administration, who noted that nothing in the founding documents promised any particular canyon would still be a canyon in the legal sense indefinitely.

Conservation groups observed that the opinion flies in the face of nearly a century of practice and remains entirely untested, with the Supreme Court widely expected to decide whether a president may erase the very thing the law was passed to preserve. The administration characterized the coming litigation as the only remaining obstacle between the public's land and its productive use.

At press time, the Office of Legal Counsel had been asked to determine whether the power to sign a law might also include the power to ignore one.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who acquired by memo the asserted power to undo in an afternoon what his predecessors spent a century of designations building, and who has for years described monument protections as federal "land grabs" to be reversed.
§The administration's "national energy emergency" agenda, handed a legal pathway to open protected acreage to drilling, mining, and logging without an act of Congress.
§The fossil fuel, mining, and timber industries, whose interest in the specific monuments under review was, by the administration's own account, the criterion used to select them.
§Uranium and lithium developers near Bears Ears and Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni, whose extraction prospects improve in precise proportion to the protections being reconsidered above them.
§The principle that any protection a president can grant, a later president can simply cancel, now extended to the permanence of public land itself.
§Future administrations inclined to monetize conservation, handed a precedent that treats a national monument as a temporary administrative preference awaiting review.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment