Might President Trump alter the boundaries of Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument to allow for logging?/NPS file

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."

Zinke, of course, was tasked by Trump with reviewing national monuments designated by Obama, Clinton, and George W. Bush. 

While Trump did make boundary revisions, substantial ones, to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase, he didn't take up Zinke's recommendations to make boundary revisions at Kathadin Woods and Waters or Cascade-Siskiyou, where Zinke suggested revisions for both to allow for logging.

Pendley also wants the administration to vigorously defend any "downward adjustments" it makes to monuments so as to force a review by the U.S. Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts in a case surrounding Obama's designation of Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument in 2021 cracked the door a bit to enterain such a review. 

When the Antiquities Act was signed into law in 1906, it gave presidents power to create national monuments "which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected..."

You can go back, at least, to 1996, when Clinton designated the 1.9-million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, to find arguments over what constitutes the "smallest area compatible."

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.

Is Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument unnecessarily large?/NOAA

Despite Trump's actions, a group of commercial fishing businesses continued to pursue their claim that Obama lacked authority to designate the monument after the loss in the D.C. Circuit Court, hoping the Supreme Court would take up the matter. While the high court refused, in a brief statement the chief justice said part of the problem with the case was that the fishermen failed to explain what would be too big in designation of a national monument.

"We have never considered how a monument of these proportions—3.2 million acres of submerged land—can be justified under the Antiquities Act. And while we have suggested that an 'ecosystem' and 'submerged lands' can, under some circumstances, be protected under the Act, we have not explained how the Act’s corresponding 'smallest area compatible' limitation interacts with the protection of such an imprecisely demarcated concept as an ecosystem," wrote Roberts. "No court of appeals has addressed the questions raised above about how to interpret the Antiquities Act’s 'smallest area compatible' requirement. The D. C. Circuit ... held that petitioners did not plead sufficient facts to assess their claim that the Monument swept beyond the 'smallest area compatible' with management of the ecosystem. To date, petitioners have not suggested what this critical statutory phrase means or what standard might guide our review of the President’s actions in this area."

That said, the chief justice noted that the high court might get another chance to rule on that question as there are "five other cases pending in federal courts concerning the boundaries of other national monuments."

Among the cases challenging a president's authority under the Antiquities Act is one that revisits the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument.

Trump's hands are somewhat tied when it comes to the size of national monuments. He legally can't alter monuments created by Congress, according to Frank Buono, a retired NPS employee who says atop of many park issues, including monuments. However, only 29 of the 88 national monuments within the National Park System were created by Congress, according to Buono.

History shows that national monuments were not created willy-nilly by either a president or Congress. 

Badlands National Park is an example that national monuments often come to be held preciously as a national park/Rebecca Latson file

Other the years Congress has converted a number of national monuments into national parks. Among them, Jackson Hole National Momument was incorporated into Grand Teton National Park in 1950; Mount Olympus National Monument, which was established under the U.S. Forest Service in 1909, was abolished and its acreage transferred to Olympic National Park in 1938; Bryce Canyon National Monument, which also started out under the Forest Service, was incorporated into Bryce Canyon National Park in 1928; and Sieur de Monts National Monument was abolished by Congress and incorporated into Lafayette National Park, which later was renamed Acadia National Park.

Other national parks that started out as national monuments include Arches, Badlands, Biscayne, Capitol Reef, Glacier Bay, Grand Canyon, Katmai, and Petrified Forest, just to name a few.

Overall, according to Buono's tally, over the years Congress abolished 58 national monuments "by incorporating their lands into national parks, national historical parks, national preserves, or other units."

Most recently, Pullman National Monument, established in 2005, was renamed Pullman National Historical Park in 2022.

The battle over the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase didn't end with the first Trump administration. A lawsuit conservation groups filed in 2017 when Trump reduced their boundaries remains pending in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. It contends only Congress, not presidents, hold the authority to shrink a monument.

Pendley, meanwhile, in his Project 2025 essay wants Trump to put a stake through the heart of the Antiquities Act by pushing for its repeal.