Major Shrinkage Ahead

Earlier this week, we published our first annual Predictions Package, featuring public-land prognostication from 30 leading experts, thinkers, policymakers, and politicians. After reading so many smart takes, this week I was inspired to make my own prediction. So here goes:

National Monuments Get a Haircut

In 2026, Americans should prepare for at least one national monument—and perhaps a half dozen—to be formally targeted for boundary reductions, weakened protections, or outright elimination.

This is hardly wild speculation. The blueprint was written and published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023, as part of the conservative policy playbook known as Project 2025. That document explicitly called for weakening the Antiquities Act, limiting future presidents' ability to create monuments, and re-opening monument lands to energy and mineral development. It framed national monuments as regulatory overreach and economic obstacles, and proposed reviewing “past monument decrees and new ones by President Biden.” It also argued that prior boundary reductions during Trump 1.0 were not extensive enough, and signaled that monuments could be downsized or abolished.

Fast forward to February 2025, when this language was echoed almost verbatim in Secretary Doug Burgum’s Interior Department directives. On his first day in office, Burgum issued a sweeping, seven-page directive aligning his public-lands management plans with the president's mandate for energy dominance. That directive—Order No. 3148— was titled "Unleashing America's Energy," which happened to be the title of an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day in office.

Burgum's memo directed Interior officials to reassess monument designations through the lens of “resource potential” and “energy independence.” That framing alone reveals the goal. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, national monuments were created to safeguard irreplaceable cultural sites, wildlife habitat, and scientific landscapes from industrial pressure. Recasting monuments as obstacles to resource development is a prelude to dismantling protections.

In 2017, Trump shrank Utah's Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase–Escalante by nearly half—the largest rollback of protected public lands in U.S. history. Those reductions were justified using the same rhetoric Project 2025 now codifies: claims of federal overreach, economic opportunity, and the need to “right-size” monument boundaries. What followed then were mining claims, drilling interest, and years of litigation.

After Secretary Burgum issued his directive early last year, conservation-minded public-lands advocates immediately armed for battle, drawing up lists of the monuments most likely to be targeted. We can expect to see the usual suspects in Utah come under threat. Bears Ears, no less a political hot potato now than it was back in 2017, will likely be on the chopping block. As will Grand Staircase–Escalante. The Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, newly protected by monument status to shield it from uranium mining, has already drawn hostility from industry groups and Western lawmakers aligned with the administration. And in New Mexico, Organ Mountains–Desert Peaks has been flagged by advocates as vulnerable because of surrounding development and mineral opportunities. Steve Pearce, the current nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees many national monuments, was a vocal opponent of the Organ Mountains designation in 2014, when he was in Congress.

There are many others considered likely targets, all due to their proximity to energy and mining interests:

• Chuckwalla National Monument (California)
• Ironwood Forest National Monument (Arizona)
• Aztec Ruins National Monument (New Mexico)
• Devils Tower National Monument (Wyoming)
• Dinosaur National Monument (Colorado/Utah)
• Grand Canyon–Parashant National Monument (Arizona)
• Hovenweep National Monument (Colorado/Utah)
• Jewel Cave National Monument (South Dakota)
• Natural Bridges National Monument (Utah)

The legal barrier to shrinking monuments is real, but it is also unresolved. The Antiquities Act gives presidents the authority to create monuments, but it does not explicitly grant them the power to undo or reduce them. For decades, the Justice Department acknowledged that only Congress could do that. Here again, however, we see the influence of Project 2025, which urged the incoming administration to overturn that interpretation. In May, the Justice Department did just that, issuing a memo that states that a president can determine that the features protected by a prior monument proclamation “either never were or no longer are deserving of the Act’s protections,” and can act accordingly to alter or even eliminate the designation.

To date, the Interior Department has yet to announce if it completed its review and plans to rethink any specific monuments. Supporters of monument protections, meanwhile, often take comfort in polling that shows strong bipartisan support for protecting public lands. Maybe, goes the thinking, the lack of action since February means the DOI is getting cold feet? An annual survey of Western voters from the Center for Western Priorities found that 89 percent want to keep existing national monument designations as they are.

But nine years ago, polling didn't stop Bears Ears from being gutted and public pressure did not stop Grand Staircase from being carved up. Now the same administration is back, armed with more experience and a governing blueprint that openly treats national monuments as expendable. Project 2025 told us exactly what was coming. If America’s national monuments shrink again this year, it will not be a surprise.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Every Friday, our team shares critical stories about public lands from around the internet. This list could be exhaustive and exhausting, but our intent is to inform, not overwhelm. Instead, we choose three to five important stories you should be aware of—including at least one piece of good news.

The Good: Wolves, Long Feared and Reviled, May Actually Be Lifesavers “A new line of research is helping to rewrite the story of the big, bad wolf, with a surprise twist. Studies have found that wolves in the Midwest and Canada not only keep deer populations in check, but they also alter deer behavior in ways that help prevent car crashes and save human lives. Discoveries like this are adding new dimensions to our understanding of what we lose when we lose species. Interdisciplinary work linking ecology and economics is revealing hidden ways that species such as frogs, vultures and bats help humanity.”

The Bad: The Trump Administration Approved a Big Lithium Mine. A Top Official’s Husband Profited. “A high-ranking official in the Interior Department is drawing scrutiny from ethics experts because she failed to disclose her family’s financial interest in the nation’s largest lithium mine that had been approved by her agency, according to state and federal records. ... In November 2019, about two years before the agency approved the mine, Ms. Budd-Falen met with Lithium Americas executives over lunch in the cafeteria at the Interior Department."

The Ugly: White House completes plan to curb bedrock environmental law “The Trump administration has finalized a plan to roll back regulations implementing a landmark environmental law that the White House says needlessly delays federal approvals for energy and infrastructure projects. The action Wednesday by the White House Council on Environmental Quality rescinds regulations related to the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider a project’s possible environmental impacts before it is approved. Katherine Scarlett, who leads the council, said in a statement that the directive will 'slash needless layering of bureaucratic burden and restore common sense to the environmental review and permitting process.' Under Trump, she added, 'NEPA’s regulatory reign of terror has ended.'”