Trump’s Interior Chief Rewrites History Of National Monuments As He Prepares Cuts
Doug Burgum says modern presidents have abused the Antiquities Act, using sweeping national monuments as "precursors" to national parks. The Grand Canyon would like a word.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum either doesn’t know or is purposefully rewriting the history of the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that 18 presidents have used to designate more than 160 national monuments.
At Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Friday, Burgum repeated his previous claim about how the original intent of the Antiquities Act, which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law, was to protect small, “Indiana Jones-type” archeological sites.
“Specifically in the law, it said the least amount of acres — not the most — the least amount of acres to be able to protect the objects,” he said. “This has been a fantastic tool for cliff dwellings, for archeological sites, it’s been used very effectively.”
The law doesn’t say “least amount of acres.” It says that monuments should be “confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
Burgum, who often speaks fondly of Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, went on to argue that recent presidents have abused the law to protect large landscapes, going beyond the scope of the act’s intent.
“About 25 years ago, there was an idea that somehow this could be a precursor to creating a wilderness area or creating a national park,” he said. “And you just needed a stroke of a pen of a president to say these vast swaths of land become a monument.”
In 1908, two years after the Antiquities Act became law, then-President Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument. It wasn’t until more than a decade later, in 1919, that Congress established Grand Canyon National Park, spanning more than 1 million acres in northwest Arizona.
The monument, designated with the stroke of Roosevelt’s pen, was literally a precursor to the Grand Canyon National Park that we cherish today.
Olympic National Park, in Washington state, has a similar history. In 1909, Roosevelt designated 610,000 acres as Mount Olympus National Monument. Congress redesignated the site as Olympic National Park in 1938.
Presidents of both parties have consistently used the Antiquities Act since Roosevelt’s time to protect massive chunks of land as national monuments — with designations often stretching into the hundreds of thousands of acres and beyond.
Republican President Calvin Coolidge created Glacier Bay National Monument, in Alaska, in 1925. Herbert Hoover, also a Republican, set aside Death Valley National Monument in 1933. Both monuments topped well over 1 million acres.
Democrat Franklin Roosevelt created or expanded dozens of national monuments, including the lands today known as Joshua Tree National Park (825,000 acres) and Zion National Park (49,150 acres).
The Interior Department did not immediately respond to Public Domain’s request for comment Monday.
Burgum’s talking points and selective timeline on this issue are nothing new. The same narrative formed the foundation of the first Trump administration’s controversial review of national monument designations, which culminated with President Donald Trump shrinking the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah by a combined 2 million acres in 2017. At the time, the Interior Department, then led by Ryan Zinke, claimed that national monuments “exploded from an average of 422 acres per monument” in the early 1900s and that “now it’s not uncommon for a monument to be more than a million acres.”
There is simply no math or cherry picking of early national monument designations that gets anywhere near that 422-acre figure, which the first Trump administration refused to substantiate, as HuffPost reported at the time.
Last week, Public Domain obtained a copy of an Interior Department draft strategic plan that, among other things, lays out the agency’s plans to “assess and right-size monuments,” “release” federal lands to state and local communities for housing development, and “return heritage lands and sites to the states.” The Washington Post reported Thursday that at least six national monuments are on the potential chopping block, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, which the Biden administration restored to their original boundaries in 2021.
Asked Friday about the timeline for national monument rollbacks, Burgum confirmed but downplayed the Trump administration’s review of protected national monuments.
“We'll go through a thorough review and whatever that timeline lays out, but this is not a top priority of the administration in terms of all the things we've got to face,” he said.
Burgum stressed during the Semafor event that the Trump administration cares “deeply” about public lands, while bemoaning the amount of federal land in states like Utah and Nevada.
“We have Western states that are being choked because they have so much public land and there is so much overreach by the federal government,” he said, adding that overlap between state and federal agencies is creating “suboptimal protection and suboptimal use of those public lands.”