This article is part of a series from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook, published by the Heritage Foundation, would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.
Just weeks ago, on August 16, 2024, the Biden-Harris administration utilized the Antiquities Act to formally designate the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Illinois, where one of the most violent race riots in U.S. history occurred. Last year, President Joe Biden used the same tool to protect nearly 1 million acres of public lands sacred to Tribes in the Grand Canyon watershed, designated as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. Protecting critical histories and landscapes such as these is one of many essential uses of the Antiquities Act.
Signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the Antiquities Act was the first U.S. law passed for the purpose of protecting cultural and natural resources with historic or scientific value on public lands. The Antiquities Act grants the president the authority to designate national monuments. It has been used by 18 presidents across party lines to protect 164 places across the country, many of which later became national parks. Communities nationwide spend decades advocating for natural or cultural sites to be protected as national monuments. For example, the community around Castner Range National Monument in El Paso, Texas, worked since 1985 to get the landscape protected and finally saw it conserved by the Biden-Harris administration in March 2023. Communities continue to call for the Antiquities Act to be used to protect other valuable areas such as Chuckwalla in California and the Great Bend of the Gila in Arizona.
Despite the fact that some of the country’s most iconic, ecologically vulnerable, and culturally sensitive landscapes benefit from protections because of this tool, the future of the Antiquities Act is actively under threat. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 lays out a far-right policy road map for a future conservative president to hit the ground running with measures aimed directly at dismantling the Antiquities Act and the places it has protected.
Project 2025 is a threat to executive conservation action
A 2023 poll by the Center for Western Priorities found that more than two-thirds of voters in Western states support the president using executive authority to designate national monuments. But despite the historically bipartisan and overwhelmingly popular nature of the Antiquities Act, its future is at risk. Project 2025 calls for a new administration to “seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906” and to consider downsizing existing monuments. These efforts parallel the extreme policy agenda of the antiparks caucus, a group of lawmakers working to increase the reach of oil and gas, erase land and water protections, overturn critical conservation rulemakings, and more.
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The playbook harkens back to the Trump administration’s two widely unpopular and seemingly legally flawed rollbacks of protections, labeled “reviews,” of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. These rollbacks prompted numerous lawsuits—some of which were led by the Native American Rights Fund, Patagonia, and the Natural Resources Defense Council—arguing that the Antiquities Act does not grant the president power to reduce or remove national monuments. Ignoring these arguments, Project 2025 calls these rollbacks “insufficient” and proposes another monument “review.” This proposal suggests that more monuments in more states are under threat of being downsized or abolished, specifically calling out monuments designated by the Biden-Harris administration.
The threat that Project 2025 poses to existing and future national monuments should not be taken lightly. William Perry Pendley, former acting director of the Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—the agency that manages the most U.S. public lands—is the author of the section of Project 2025 about public lands. Perry Pendley has publicly denied climate change and has shared his beliefs that public lands should be sold off. In fact, he spent years of his longtime anti-conservation career, prior to his role at the BLM, advocating for public land sell-off as president of Mountain States Legal Foundation. This extreme position is immensely unpopular, has strong ties to antigovernment extremism, and has led to strong backlash in the West. Perry Pendley’s extremism extends to his views on national monuments and the Antiquities Act, going as far as suggesting that even Theodore Roosevelt “abused” his authority by signing the Antiquities Act into law.
Despite the historically bipartisan and overwhelmingly popular nature of the Antiquities Act, its future is at risk.
The Antiquities Act has provided 118 years of protections
In its 118 years of existence, the Antiquities Act has been used to protect 164 places and has served as a critical launching point for public land protections of all types. This tool allows for expedited conservation of especially vulnerable natural resources by allowing the president to act to conserve at-risk landscapes while popular conservation bills get held up in congressional gridlock. Often, protections are later cemented through legislative establishment as a national park or through administrative establishment as a national forest or wildlife refuge. There are now 32 national parks that were originally protected as national monuments.
These national monuments-turned-national parks have become some of the most visited, most popular, and most iconic public lands in the country, to the extent that many are now household names. Sites including the Grand Canyon, Zion, Acadia, Grand Teton, Joshua Tree, and Olympic national parks—all originally protected as monuments—boasted some of the highest visitation counts of any national parks across the country in 2023. Other national parks, such as Death Valley, Denali, Glacier, and Arches, host some of the most unique visitor experiences, ranging from international dark-sky parks to the highest mountain in North America, just to name a few highlights. Katmai National Park, another site that began as a monument, may be most well-known for its annual Fat Bear Week, but it is also home to numerous volcanoes that are a testament to the variety of landscapes protected by the Antiquities Act.
The Biden-Harris administration has used the Antiquities Act 11 times to protect more than 1.6 million previously unprotected acres and restore protections for more than 2 million acres of land across the country. These protections include restoring Bears Ears National Monument, expanding San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, and designating Avi Kwa Ame National Monument—among others. These designations are significant in their conservation impact, and most of them also stand to document and preserve the stories of historically underrepresented communities. This is important, as only about 25 percent of existing national monuments are dedicated to recording and protecting diverse histories on U.S. public lands. For example, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument conserves lands that are sacred to many Tribal nations and Indigenous communities, and the Biden-Harris administration’s designation of this site opened the door to co-stewardship with Tribes there. National monument designations have been a crucial way for the administration to deliver on its commitments to equitable and inclusive conservation.
Additionally, a 2020 study by Resources for the Future found that new monument designations result in increased local jobs and business establishments. Outdoor recreation is a critical driver of the U.S. economy and the source of more than 4.5 million jobs across the country. Protected places such as national monuments support local communities and businesses as well as the national outdoor recreation industry.
Conclusion
In just over a century, the Antiquities Act has preserved some of the country’s most historically and culturally important and ecologically vital public lands for the enjoyment and awe of generations to come. But Project 2025 poses a clear threat to the future of this tool. If a far-right administration succeeds in repealing the Antiquities Act, as laid out in Project 2025, presidents from both parties will lose this long-standing, impactful conservation device. The Antiquities Act plays a unique role in actualizing community-led conservation in a way that actually encourages community engagement. Many communities are actively advocating for new national monument designations on nearby public lands, such as Frances Perkins Homestead in Maine, Bahsahwahbee in Nevada, and the Dolores Canyons in Colorado. Getting rid of a tool that has been so impactful over the past 118 years would have disastrous consequences for the state of conservation in the United States.
The author would like to thank Mariel Lutz, Sharon Ferguson, Jenny Rowland-Shea, Nicole Gentile, Bill Rapp, Beatrice Aronson, Shanée Simhoni, Mona Alsaidi, and the local and national conservation leaders who are building impactful and equitable conservation solutions every day.