Great Old Broads for Wilderness Statement on the Effort to Gut the Antiquities Act

For Immediate Release: January 17, 2025

Media Contact: Jason M. Vaughn, Communications Coordinator, Great Old Broads for Wilderness (Email)

Durango, CO—This week, Rep Celeste Maloy (R-UT) and Rep. Mark Armodei (R-NV) introduced legislation in the House of Representatives that, if passed, would effectively repeal the 1906 Antiquities Act by requiring Congress to approve the establishment or extension of a National Monument.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 is one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. For more than a century, presidents from both parties have used the authority granted under the act to protect some of America’s most iconic and popular landscapes, historic places, and cultural sites. This newly-introduced Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act (H.R. 521)—which would take the authority to create or expand a national monument from a president, and instead give it to a Congress that has consistently failed to act with the purposeful speed needed to protect our country’s notable landscapes—flies directly in the face of overwhelming public support for protecting and preserving the nation’s public lands, and represents an open invitation to extractive industries to pollute and destroy those irreplaceable lands for the sake of profit for a few, privileged individuals.

We strongly urge Congress to listen to the will of the American people and reject this terrible piece of legislation.

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Great Old Broads for Wilderness is a women-led national grassroots organization that engages and inspires activism to preserve and protect wilderness and wild lands.