A US president’s power to create and undo national monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act is among the White House’s “most sweeping unilateral powers,” the Justice Department said in a slip opinion.
The opinion forms the Justice Department’s rationale for abolishing national monuments, many of which have been declared by presidents to protect large swaths of public land from development.
President Donald Trump has been largely hostile to large national monuments and has taken steps to consider allowing mining companies to access minerals within them.
In his first term, Trump shrank Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national ...