June 18, 2025 — The president has broad legal authority to fully revoke national monument designations, the Justice Department says in a memorandum that could become the basis to withdraw millions of acres from protected status.
The department’s Office of Legal Counsel disavowed a 1938 DOJ determination that presidents can’t revoke a monument designation by a predecessor under the 1906 law known as the Antiquities Act. The May 27 memo, made public last week, noted that Congress gave presidents the power to declare monuments, but that lawmakers never explicitly said he couldn’t decrease the size of one.
President Donald Trump could use the opinion to go farther than he did in his first term, when he reduced the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, and allowed commercial fishing in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of New England.
The Biden administration later restored the two Utah monuments to their original size and restored the original protections for the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts monument.
The Justice Department said that if the president has the power to remove protections for a portion of a monument, then he could do so for the entirety of the monument.