Interior Considers Opening National Monuments to Mining (2)

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed an executive order late Monday directing his deputies to submit a plan to him within 15 days for opening federal lands to more mining, including national monuments currently off limits to miners.

Burgum’s order, which doesn’t explicitly use the term “national monument,” calls for Interior assistant secretaries to, among many things, “review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands, consistent with existing law,” citing US code allowing presidents to designate national monuments and withdraw them from mineral development.

The order is a first step in opening Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante and many other national monuments to mining and other mineral development. State lawmakers in Utah and Arizona, and many Congressional Republicans, have criticized presidential use of the Antiquities Act to block mining, fossil fuels development, and other industrial and recreational access to monuments on federal land.

The Interior Department said in an email that it would be “pre-decisional” to make any assumption about the outcome of any of the reviews required under Burgum’s order.

The order also directs Interior agencies to prioritize critical mineral development and help establish the US “as the leading producer and processor of nonfuel minerals, including rare earth minerals” with additional focus on critical minerals.

President Joe Biden in 2023 created Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona in part to block uranium development there near the Grand Canyon. Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which Bill Clinton created in 1996, contains deposits of cobalt, coal, and other minerals.

Burgum’s order “is a sweeping mandate to review and develop an action plan for revising an array of regulatory and other public land actions, including for coal leasing, onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing, the implementation of the Endangered Species Act, all designed to promote fossil fuel development on the nation’s public lands—and as quickly as possible,” said Sam Kalen, an environmental law professor at Indiana University.

But, the Interior Department will have to follow a long land-use planning process to allow mining on lands currently closed to such development, Kalen said.

The language of the order makes clear that withdrawing rights to mine minerals in monuments is to be done in ways that are consistent with existing law, said Mark Squillace, a natural resources law professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

Burgum can rescind or modify a minerals withdrawal, but he’ll have to follow the detailed process outlined in statute and will have to provide sufficient reasoning to overcome a previous president’s purpose for withdrawing minerals from monument lands in the first place, Squillace said.

Environmental groups accused the Trump administration of secretively plundering protected federal lands, including scores of national monuments that the Interior Department manages.

“Hiding the ball on a review of national monuments shows the White House and Interior know full well how unpopular these actions are,” Dan Hartinger, director of agency policy for the Wilderness Society, said in a statement. “We hope Secretary Burgum will reconsider this approach and listen to the public about how essential protected public lands are to their local communities and ways of life.”

National monuments are at the center of litigation before the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The court is expected to rule soon in Garfield County v. Biden, a case filed by Utah and two Utah counties challenging Biden’s use of the Antiquities Act to re-establish Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.