THE PROBLEM

A Law Built for Ruins, Now Used Against Recreation

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 for a simple purpose: protecting prehistoric ruins and artifacts from looters in the American Southwest. It was carefully written to give the president authority to set aside only the "smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected."

What Congress never intended was for that narrow tool to become a blank check. Over the following century, presidential proclamations grew from 160-acre archaeological sites to multi-million-acre region-wide designations — stripping miners of their claims, closing OHV trails, and dismantling the economies of rural communities — all without a single vote in Congress.

When President Biden designated Grand Staircase-Escalante (1.87 million acres), Bears Ears (1.36 million acres), and the Chuckwalla National Monument (624,000 acres) — he didn't just push the limits. He rewrote them, declaring entire landscapes, ecosystems, habitats, and animal species to be protectable "objects" under the Act. As Chief Justice Roberts warned: these proclamations transform presidential discretion into "a power without any discernible limit."

"The bill proposes to create small reservations reserving only so much land as may be absolutely necessary for the preservation of these interesting relics of prehistoric times."
— House Report, Antiquities Act, 1906

BRC believes the courts must enforce the plain text of the law. We're not waiting for that to happen. We're making it happen.

MODERN HISTORY OF ABUSE

13.9 Million Acres, Three Presidents, One Direction

The original language of the Act is one thing. But the trend line of Antiquities Act designations further reveals presidential abuse. The below chart respresents every terrestrial Antiquities Act designation, reduction, and restoration over the last 50 years. But why did we start at 1976?

Pre-1976 Designations

Before 1976, the Antiquities Act was one of the few tools available to protect federal public lands. But even then, presidents respected its statutory intent: protecting small, site-specific objects. Devils Tower (Roosevelt, 1906) was 1,152 acres. El Morro (Roosevelt, 1906) was 160 acres. Aztec Ruins (Harding, 1923) was 25 acres. Even the largest pre-1996 designations were eventually elevated to national park status by Congressional vote. The Act functioned exactly as written: protection for ruins, artifacts, geological features, and historic landmarks.

Modern Era Protections

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Congress built a comprehensive framework for protecting public lands. NEPA (1969) required environmental review of major federal actions. The Endangered Species Act (1973) protected species and habitat. FLPMA (1976) gave BLM a multiple-use mandate, public-input requirements, and resource management planning. The National Forest Management Act (1976) did the same for the U.S. Forest Service. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and many others layered additional protections on top. And most importantly, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (1979) created additional protections for cultural resources with real enforcement teeth and penalties.

By 1976, federal public lands had robust, congressionally-authorized, publicly-accountable protective frameworks. The Antiquities Act has the narrowest statutory scope of any modern public lands tool, and the lowest democratic threshold. A president can use it without a single vote, hearing, or public comment period. 

Modern Era Abuse

Starting in 1979 not a single acre was designated under the Antiquties Act until 1996. Clinton's Grand Staircase-Escalante designation changed that. 1.7 million acres of BLM multiple-use land was now deemed a monument. This marked the beginning of the modern era of Antiquities Act abuse where landscapes, ecosystems, and entire regions could be declared "objects" under a law written to protect cliff dwellings and pueblo ruins. Every large designation since has followed that template functioning as de facto Wilderness designations on the grandest of scales.

That categorical break is the abuse pattern.

Every landscape designated as a million-acre national monument since 1996 was already protected through congressionally-authorized planning processes and regulations. The Antiquities Act became a tool once again— not because other tools or protections were nonexistant— but because it was a tool that could side-step Congress and could lock up large swaths of land as defacto Wilderness without public accountability.

This chart starts in 1976 because that is when the legal landscape changed. Every designation shown here could have been pursued through congressionally-authorized planning processes. That is the abuse pattern. For a more detailed look at the timeline of presidential abuse in the modern era, jump to our table below.

Our Legal Theory

Why These Monuments Are Unlawful

BRC's legal challenges rest on the plain text of a 120-year-old law that presidential proclamations have consistently ignored.

First: A landscape is not an "object situated on land" — it is the land. The Supreme Court recognized this in Mass. Lobstermen's Ass'n v. Raimondo, where Chief Justice Roberts noted that recent monuments have transformed the Antiquities Act into "a power without any discernible limit." If any landscape qualifies as an "object," then every inch of federal land could become a monument.

Second: Even if some valid objects exist within a monument's borders, the law requires that designated land be confined to "the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected." The Biden proclamations don't even attempt this analysis — they name everything together, draw a line around millions of acres, and declare the size requirement satisfied.

Third: In the Chuckwalla case, BRC raises an additional constitutional argument: that an Antiquities Act interpreted without meaningful limits violates the Property Clause by delegating to the president an essentially unlimited power that the Constitution reserves for Congress.

"There is no way to judicially salvage the Monuments, in whole or in part. The proper course is to simply set aside the unlawful proclamations."
— BRC's Complaint, Garfield County v. Biden