E&E NEWS • June 10, 2025
A key legal adviser to the White House said that President Donald Trump has the authority to abolish national monuments created by prior presidents. Lanora Pettit, who helms the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), overturned a nearly 90-year-old precedent governing national monuments in a new legal opinion published Tuesday. The opinion declares that the Antiquities Act of 1906 not only allows presidents to create national monuments from federal lands, but also says they can declare that existing monuments “either never were or no longer are deserving of the Act’s protections.” Justin Pidot, a law professor at the University of Arizona who previously worked at White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, said the OLC opinion marks a “radical shift.” “This will go down as one of the most significant rollbacks in conservation in history,” Pidot said. Pettit’s interpretation of the Antiquities Act would effectively reduce protections for monuments to just the length of a presidential term, he said.