Trump officials are analyzing whether to remove federal protections for national monuments spanning millions of acres in the West, according to two people familiar with the matter and an internal Interior Department document, in order to spur energy development on public lands.
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Interior Department aides are looking at whether to scale back at least six national monuments, said these individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because no final decisions had been made. The list, they added, includes Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — national monuments spread across Arizona, California, New Mexico and Utah.
Interior Department officials are poring over geological maps to analyze the monuments’ potential for mining and oil production and assess whether to revise their boundaries, one individual said.
Such a move would build on President Donald Trump’s policies that aim to boost American energy and critical minerals production, which he says is vital to economic growth and powering artificial intelligence. Trump has declared
a national energy emergency, established an energy council to fast-track resource development projects and sought to
dismantle dozens of environmental protections.
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The push would spark an intense legal fight over the right of a president to grant sweeping lands protections under the 1906 Antiquities Act — and take them away. In his first term, Trump became the first president in more than half a century to modify existing national monuments when he drastically
shrank the boundaries of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — only for President Joe Biden
to reverse the cuts.
In 2021, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
invited litigants to challenge how presidents of both parties have used the law to ban commercial activities in vast stretches of land and ocean.
The law limits presidents to protecting “the smallest area compatible with the care and management,” Roberts wrote. “Somewhere along the line, however, this restriction has ceased to pose any meaningful restraint.”
Conservation and Indigenous advocates argue that there is little demand to develop those resources and that the monuments represent vital ecological and sacred cultural reserves that local communities fought for years to protect.
“They opened up Grand Staircase under the previous [Trump] administration and the coal market did not rush in, the oil and gas market did not rush in, nobody rushed in,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, who led Interior’s Bureau of Land Management under Biden. “There are plenty of minerals elsewhere. This is about an ideological battle.”
While Interior officials declined to comment Wednesday about any potential monument review, the approach was outlined in a “strategic plan draft framework” shared with The Washington Post. One of the department’s “potential performance measures” going forward, according to the document, will be making sure monuments are “assessed and correctly sized.”
