February 13, 2025 — One of the requests made by the authors of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the Trump administration, is that President Donald Trump again shrink national monuments.
Whether he will remains to be seen, though the most likely candidates are Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, from which Trump sheared a combined 2 million acres during his first term, only to watch President Joe Biden restore the original boundaries as set by Presidents Barack Obama (Bears Ears) and Bill Clinton (Grand Staircase).
The authors of Project 2025 don’t want him to stop there. Indeed, the section on the Interior Department, written by William Perry Pendley, who was a longtime president of the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation that worked to see federal lands turned over to states, maintains that Trump didn’t go far enough during his first term.
“Although President Trump courageously ordered a review of national monument designations, the result of that review was insufficient in that only two national monuments in one state (Utah) were adjusted,” wrote Pendley. “Monuments in Maine [Kathadin Woods and Waters] and Oregon [Cascade-Siskiyou], for example, should have been adjusted downward given the finding of Secretary Ryan Zinke’s review that they were improperly designated.”
The 5,000-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument encompasses a biologically robust area located about 100 miles southeast of Cape Cod National Seashore. It became the Atlantic Ocean’s first national monument when Obama established it. President Trump during his first term removed restrictions that kept commercial fishermen out of the monument.