In the last month, President Donald Trump, Congress and the Department of Interior have set a course to peel back safeguards on public lands, including national monuments and other designations that ban development and extraction. 

On Monday, Feb. 3, on his first day in office, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a series of orders advancing Trump’s energy and environmental agenda. Among them was a broad order titled “Unleashing American Energy” which mandates a 15-day review of all public lands that have been withdrawn from drilling and mining development. 

The order aims to meet the new administration’s goal of encouraging energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters as well as restoring multiple use on public lands. 

Multiple use — or the allowance of various, simultaneous activities including recreation, logging and conservation — was also the subject of the first U.S. House public lands subcommittee hearing of the new Congress on Tuesday, Feb 11. During the hearing, Democrats and Republicans shared different visions for the appropriate balance of allowed uses. 

Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican from Wisconsin who chairs the subcommittee, said former President Joe Biden “left America’s public lands and natural resources in a sorry state.”

“Thankfully, a unified Republican government means that relief is now at hand. Instead of ignoring local voices, we are putting Western communities back in the driver’s seat to shape the land and resource policies that affect their lives,” Tiffany said

Public lands can be withdrawn from extraction and development as part of national monument designations, historic preservation declarations, critical habitat mandates for endangered species and more. 

Anna Peterson, the executive director of The Mountain Pact, a nonprofit that advocates for Western mountain communities on federal climate, said this secretarial order is intentionally vague and secretive but clearly targets national monuments and areas protected under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Rather than explicitly name either, the order cites the statutory codes that govern them. 

“These orders have kicked off a secret national monuments review — with no public input — that includes all monuments,” Peterson added. “Attacks on monuments and the laws that created them are shady attempts to rip apart the beloved public lands that safeguard our clean air and water, buoy the outdoor recreation economy, and preserve a national heritage rich in culture and natural beauty.”

What has the Trump administration said about national monuments? 

While the secretarial order does not directly name national monuments, Project 2025, a conservative roadmap that offers ideas for a new Republican administration, along with actions in the first Trump administration and criticism of Biden’s conservation efforts offer some insight into what could happen with national monuments over the next four years. 

Biden established, expanded and restored 15 national monuments during his term, using presidential power granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish these sites. No president has fully eliminated a monument created by a predecessor, but adjustments are often made. 

Trump ordered a review of national monuments during his first term. This resulted in the reshuffling of management terms and the reduction of two Utah monuments — the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Bear Ears National Monument — as well as changes to New England’s Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to open up commercial fishing. Biden restored the size of the two Utah monuments, but the action was challenged in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed by the state of Utah. 

Trump designated one national monument in his first term: Kentucky’s Camp Nelson National Monument, a site that served as a Union Army recruitment center for African American soldiers during the Civil War. 

Biden’s monument dedications were often cited as part of his administration’s larger goal to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. 

A memo for Tuesday’s public lands subcommittee hearing called this 30×30 initiative “an unscientific and ill-defined goal,” calling mineral withdrawals under the effort “ill-advised” and national monument expansions and dedications as “unilateral and unpopular.”

Republicans have expressed concerns that national monument dedications prevent multiple use on federal lands. Restoring multiple-use principles to public lands “will help lower housing costs, ease the way for much-needed development projects, allow for increased access to public lands, improve forest health, bolster rural economies, and secure American energy dominance,” according to the memo for Tuesday’s hearing. 

In January, Utah Republican Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis introduced a bill to gut and reform the Antiquities Act, eliminating the president’s unilateral power to designate monuments. 

Peterson said this bill and the recent Interior Department orders are examples that “Trump and his Congressional allies are using public lands and waters as handouts to billionaires.” 

During Tuesday’s hearing, Rep, Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California and the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee ranking member, said that Burgum’s secretarial orders “set the stage for rolling back practically every beneficial public lands policy from the past four years, exactly as called for in Project 2025.”

Huffman said that following this playbook and “rolling back initiatives like the Public Lands Rule, stripping protections for places like the boundary waters, peeling back national monuments to hand over our public lands to polluting billionaire barons is the betrayal of the American people and the lands we all love.”

Could public support safeguard Colorado’s Camp Hale National Monument? 

Of the 10 new monuments dedicated under Biden, the first was the designation of 53,804 acres in Eagle and Summit counties as the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in October 2022. The move recognized the site as a sacred area for the Ute People and as the training site for the 10th Mountain Division, a World War II mountain infantry division whose veterans returned to establish Colorado’s ski industry. 

Camp Hale was previously designated as a national historic site in 1992. Becoming a national monument offered it new “protections and opportunities for additional interpretation,” according to a U.S. Forest Service fact sheet on the site. Among the new protections was the site’s withdrawal from new mining claims as well as from mineral and resource leasing. 

Chris Arend, communications director for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, wrote in a statement that the department has yet to hear of plans to redraw Camp Hale’s boundaries.

“The Camp Hale National Monument is an American treasure that sustains multiple public uses, conserves important wildlife habitat and preserves historic and ancestral lands,” Arend wrote. “The state has no reason to believe that the Trump Administration has any plans to alter the current Camp Hale designation though we stand by national monument designation as it stands today.” 

However, Peterson said that the recent secretarial order and actions from the administration put monuments like Camp Hale and mineral withdrawals like the Thompson Divide — which was initiated around the same time — in the crosshairs and could lead to rollbacks.  

Pendley references the monument briefly in his Project 2025 recommendations. 

“Like the outrageous, unilateral withdrawals from public use of multiple-use federal land under the Carter, Clinton, and Obama Administrations, Biden’s first national monument was one in Colorado — adopted over the objections of scores of local groups and at least one American Indian tribe,” he wrote

The only objection cited by Pendley is the criticism the Biden administration received from the Utah-based Ute Indian Tribe following the proclamation. The tribe expressed concerns that its leaders were not consulted ahead of the national monument declaration on their ancestral lands. 

While the monument was supported by Colorado Democrats, the action was also opposed by Colorado Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert, Ken Buck and Doug Lamborn. They referred to it as an overreach of power that aligned with extremist environmentalists, citing concerns from groups primarily aligned with the interests of the oil and gas industry.

However, in the face of current public land threats, local advocates of both Camp Hale and the Thompson Divide withdrawal are leaning into the bipartisan public support that led to both protections in the first place.

“Designation of the Camp Hale National Monument has enjoyed broad-based support from veterans, hunters and anglers, outdoor recreation groups, tribes, as well as an array of elected officials,” Arend wrote. 

Greg Poschman, a Pitkin County commissioner and 10th Mountain Division descendant, wrote in a statement that the Camp Hale monument was a “fitting tribute to the heroes who served our country in World War II” that “engenders respect for the land and history.” 

Representatives from Colorado’s two tribes — the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Tribe — were on stage with Biden and electeds during the Camp Hale dedication as well as during a one-year anniversary celebration of the proclamation. At the latter, tribes requested that they be involved in co-management and tribal involvement in the protection of Camp Hale.  

Roush added that support from various stakeholders that led to the protections “will really matter in the work to keep those protections.”  

A 2023 Conservation in the West Poll from Colorado College reported that 87% of Coloradans surveyed supported presidents using their authority to protect public lands as national monuments. 

“I share the concerns of many that this administration’s action will deeply harm our state’s conservation efforts, and as Ranking Member of the House Subcommittee on Federal Lands, I will use every tool at my disposal to stand firm against any attempts to roll back critical protections for our federal lands and resources,” said Rep. Joe Neguse in a statement.

A spokesperson for Sen. Michael Bennet said he believes in a “balanced approach” to public lands “that allows for various uses on our public lands and includes critical protections for sensitive areas.”