US DOJ claims Antiquities Act provides presidential power to revoke national monuments News
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US DOJ claims Antiquities Act provides presidential power to revoke national monuments

The US Department of Justice released a legal opinion on Tuesday stating that President Donald Trump has the power to abolish two national monuments established by former presidents.

The 50-page opinion supports a president’s authority to revoke national monuments that were created under the Antiquities Act, despite the lack of this specific language in the statute. The opinion contradicts a 1938 legal opinion that said a president did not have the power of revocation under the law.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora C. Pettit argued in the opinion that “[t]he power to declare carries with it the power to revoke,” referencing several occasions when presidents have decreased the size of previously created national monuments. Pettit stated:

By reenacting the Antiquities Act in a way that splits those two powers into different provisions, Congress made pellucid what was always true—that each power is related to, but ultimately independent of, the other, and that the President may exercise one independently of the other.

The opinion took particular aim at two national monuments in California declared by then-President Joe Biden in 2025. Chuckwalla National Monument is in Southern California, where the Mojave and Colorado Deserts meet. The Sáttítla Highlands National Monument is near the California-Oregon border. The federal proclamations for both areas noted their cultural and historical significance to Indigenous peoples.

In 2014, Congress amended the Antiquities Act, which was originally signed into law in 1906. The amended version separates a president’s authority to declare historic landmarks, structures, or objects from a president’s authority to also reserve parcels of land, which “shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

 

 

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