E&E NEWS June 17, 2025
Environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers are casting a wary eye on where, and when, President Donald Trump might aim a new legal directive that argues he has the power to wipe out national monuments created by his predecessors in the White House. “We’ve never lived in a world where the president at his whim can abolish a monument and what that means exactly; we will have to see,” said Justin Pidot, a Maine native and law professor at the University of Arizona who previously worked at the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. “But it massively scales back the protective power of the Antiquities Act.”