Interior Secretary Burgum eyes national monuments for energy resources
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has directed his staff to review and possibly alter national monuments as part of a push to expand U.S. energy production, a move that could further shake up public lands amid mass firings of national park and forest employees.
Conservationists fear that cherished landscapes — including two newly minted California monuments — will be stripped of protections for significant cultural and ecological resources. But conservatives have argued that public lands should remain open to oil drilling and coal mining, among other uses.
In a Feb. 3 order, Burgum directed his assistant secretaries to "review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands," citing a federal statute corresponding to the 1906 law that allows presidents to create national monuments.
The directive was part of a sweeping secretarial order, called "Unleashing American Energy," that seeks to boost resource extraction on federal land and water. Burgum gave agency officials 15 days to submit plans on how to comply with his order, which are now under review.
"At this stage, we are assessing these reports to determine if any further action is warranted, and we remain dedicated to ensuring that all items are thoroughly evaluated as part of our internal management process," said J. Elizabeth Peace, senior public affairs specialist for the Interior Department's Office of the Secretary, in a statement.
Peace did not indicate when the review might conclude or what actions could be taken.
Critics see the move as opening the door to redraw or eliminate monuments.
During his first term, President Trump sharply reduced the boundaries of two monuments in Utah — Bear's Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — and stripped protections from a marine monument off the coast of New England to allow commercial fishing.
Biden reversed the changes, but some believe the review underway will pave the way for similar actions by the second Trump administration.
Whether presidents have the authority to alter existing monuments is unclear and hotly contested. Litigation challenging Trump's previous monument reductions was still pending when Biden reversed them and the matter was never settled.
In recent weeks, thousands of recent hires at the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service were laid off as part of a broader effort by Trump and advisor Elon Musk to slash the federal bureaucracy, which has sparked protests and backlash.
What is a national monument?
Most national monuments are created by presidents, but Congress can also establish them. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the authority to designate monuments to protect "objects of historic and scientific interest" and can encompass geologic wonders, archaeological sites and wildlife habitat. Presidents on both sides of the political aisle have used the law to set aside land.
Monuments can be managed by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies. They typically exclude oil and gas drilling, coal mining and other forms of energy production.
What's at stake in California?
California is home to 21 national monuments, more than any other state in the country — spanning rugged coastlines, stately sequoia groves and striking desert canyons. They include the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument near Los Angeles and the Sand to Snow National Monument east of the city, as well as the Lava Beds National Monument in the far northeastern part of the state.
Sean Hecht, managing attorney for the California regional office of Earthjustice, a nonprofit focused on litigating environmental issues, believes the state's youngest monuments are most at risk of being rolled back, citing political reasons.
During his final days in office, former President Biden designated two national monuments in California's desert and far north — Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument. Native Americans led the charge to safeguard the land they consider sacred.
'Older and more established monuments tend to be popular in California — while new monuments are often not as established with a wide constituency, and therefore are more vulnerable politically,' Hecht said in an email. He added that Trump may target the monuments as part of an effort to undo recent actions by Biden.
The new monuments are also home to natural resources that could make them a target, stakeholders said.
Sáttítla, which spans more than 224,000 acres of lush forests and pristine lakes near the Oregon border, has been explored for geothermal energy development.
Located south of Joshua Tree National Park, 640,000-acre Chuckwalla could be zeroed in on for water beneath the rugged desert floor, according to Donald Medart Jr., former councilman for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, which was among the tribes that led the push for the monument designation.
"To extract all that groundwater would leave a devastating effect on our area," said Medart, now a tribal engagement specialist for Onoo Po Strategies, a consulting firm.
If it's oil the Trump administration is after, the Carrizzo Plain National Monument — a renowned wildflower viewing destination in southeastern San Luis Obispo County — may be eyed. The grassland plain home to several vulnerable plants and animals historically had drilling and is the only monument in the state with oil potential, said Brendan Cummings, conservation director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focus on protecting endangered species.
Attempts to alter monuments in California and elsewhere would almost certainly be met with lawsuits, according to conservation and environmental groups.
Monument designations have divided recreationists. Anglers, hunters and hikers have said that ushering in resource extraction on public lands will cut off access to activities in breathtaking landscapes. But off-road vehicle enthusiasts and those who support dispersed camping say mining and drilling is typically compatible with their needs — and that monument designations can push out their preferred use of the land.
At stake is access to outings in nature that bring joy and mental health benefits — and big business. Outdoor recreation contributed $81.5 billion to California's economy in 2023, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Those who enjoy hunting and fishing on public lands "should be concerned about decision-making behind closed doors for the future of these wild places," Joel Weltzien, California chapter coordinator for Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, said in a statement.
Ben Burr, executive director of the BlueRibbon Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for off-highway vehicle access, voiced his support for reviewing the nation's monuments — with the hope that changes will allow for more varied forms of recreation.
'Monuments tend to limit the kinds of recreation use that can happen and really give preferential access to certain user groups,' he said. Monuments typically limit camping to particular areas, he said as an example, while some people want to be able to hunker down far from other people.
Is Project 2025 in play?
Monument proponents fear Burgum's order is part of the enactment of Project 2025, a controversial policy playbook written by conservatives as a guide for the Trump administration. Project 2025 calls for downsizing more monuments and repealing the Antiquities Act.
But some are skeptical about how far Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota and GOP presidential primary candidate, will go.
John Leshy, an emeritus professor at UC College of the Law, San Francisco and a former solicitor at the Interior Department, described Burgum as "kind of a conventional choice" to head the department that manages millions of acres of public land.
While Burgum is close to the oil and gas industry, he doesn't appear to be a "real ideologue," said Leshy, who is the author of 'Our Common Ground: A History of America's Public Lands.'
Burgum is also known for maintaining good relationships with tribes in North Dakota.
Native Americans "by and large, they're quite supportive of the national monuments and the protective things that have been done," Leshy said. "So does he want to take on that interest group and alienate them? I don't know."
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Fox News
21 minutes ago
- Fox News
'You can't serve on Facebook': Military spouse calls Americans to act on Flag Day
All times eastern Special Report with Bret Baier FOX News Radio Live Channel Coverage WATCH LIVE: Trump attends 'Les Misérables' premiere at Kennedy Center

Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Stephen Miller Threatened ICE Leaders With a Furious Ultimatum Over Arrest Targets
An irate Stephen Miller threatened senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials with termination unless their offices upped their game and started detaining at least 3,000 migrants a day. The White House deputy chief of staff also warned that leaders of field offices ranking in the bottom 10 percent for migrant arrests were at risk of being fired, NBC News reports, citing unnamed sources. The outbursts from Miller, viewed as the architect behind many of President Donald Trump's most hardline immigration policies, came during a mid-May meeting with ICE officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was also present, though was reportedly in a calmer mood. Soon after Miller issued his threat, ICE began ramping up its efforts to detain undocumented migrants across the U.S. The plan, dubbed 'Operation At Large,' involved thousands of federal law enforcement officers and special forces, many of whom don't typically assist with immigration, being pulled in to help ICE round up migrants accused of being in the country illegally. The operation has also called for the deployment of about 21,000 National Guard troops, as well as 250 IRS agents who could use tax data to track down immigrants. Trump's push to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history is reportedly sparking friction among federal agencies. FBI agents, who normally steer clear of immigration enforcement and administrative removal orders, are increasingly being tasked with helping ICE arrest undocumented migrants. Teams within the Justice Department working on unrelated matters have also been disbanded and reassigned to focus on immigration-related cases. Federal agencies' intense preoccupation with detaining migrants that is now influencing whether a case is prosecuted at all. In one instance, a U.S. attorney's office dropped a potential federal prosecution involving a dangerous suspect simply because there wasn't a clear immigration angle. The office passed the case to state prosecutors instead. 'Immigration status is now question No. 1 in terms of charging decisions,' an assistant U.S. attorney told NBC News. 'Is this person a documented immigrant? Is this person an undocumented immigrant? Is this person a citizen? Are they somehow deportable? What is their immigration status? And the answer to that question is now largely driving our charging decisions.' In response to reports of Miller's outburst, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: 'Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump's and the American people's mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.' The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from the Daily Beast.