Vengeful Biden Uses Century-Old Law to Thwart Trump Plan
It looks like Joe Biden will be a thorn in Donald Trump’s side long after he vacates the Oval Office, after the outgoing president used a pair of aging laws to effectively troll his successor.
Just a day after using a 72-year-old law to stymie Trump’s ambitions to explore offshore drilling opportunities, Biden is at it again—this time deploying a piece of legislation more than a century old to hamper his old foe’s plans.
The ace up “Sleepy Joe’s” sleeve this time proved he’s not so slow, as he invoked the 119-year-old Antiquities Act to protect a vast area of land in southern California, where the Colorado and Mojave Deserts come together.
The area, now known as Chuckwalla National Monument, spans over 624,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management—controlled public lands, and becomes the largest tract of protected land in the continental U.S. The Sáttítla Highlands National Monuments, in the north of the state, will also come into existence, creating a total protected area of nearly 850,000 acres, according a White House statement Tuesday.
Trump took issue with the Antiquities Act in April 2017, when he decreed an executive reversal instructing the Department of the Interior to review then-President Obama’s designations of national monuments. Trump was seeking to free up over 553 million acres of natural areas that Obama had protected from development—plus 219 million more set aside by Presidents Clinton and Bush.
Ryan Bidwell, Senior Director of Conservation at the Conservation Lands Foundation, told the Daily Beast at the time that the step was “a thinly veiled attempt to turn these lands over to oil and gas drillers and sell them off to corporate interests.”
But under Biden’s new order, that will become more difficult. “With today’s designations and yesterday’s actions to protect the East and West coasts and the Northern Bering Sea from offshore oil and natural gas drilling, President Biden has now protected 674 million acres of U.S. lands and waters,” a White House statement boasted.
The move reflects Biden’s ambition to leave a green legacy, but it will serve as a bump in the road to Trump’s presidential ambitions—even before he takes office.
And Trump, speaking at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday, addressed Biden’s move. He said: “They took away 625 million acres of offshore drilling... nobody else does that. I’m going to have it revoked on day one. If we need to we’ll go to the courts, if they try to be sneaky... remember this is a man who said he wants the transition to be smooth. You don’t do those kind of things.”
“We’re going to be drilling soon,” he vowed.
It comes after Biden invoked the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) to prevent new fossil fuel developments off the East and West coasts of the U.S. as well as in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.
The law gives presidents the power to permanently withdraw parts of the outer continental shelf from future oil and gas leasing—but doesn’t include a provision for how another president could revoke such an order. Trump would therefore likely have to get Congress to change the law before he could undo Biden’s action.
Trump’s incoming press secretary bemoaned the move, saying it was politically motivated. “This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices,” Karoline Leavitt wrote in a post on X. “Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom previously said that Trump’s “only interest is pleasing Big Oil CEOs,” and the incoming president has blasted the state’s liberal environmental-led agenda in the past.
But politics aside, Biden’s plans serve to uphold conservation on a jaw-dropping scale. Chuckwalla National Monument will be a capstone action to create the largest corridor of protected lands in the continental United States, covering nearly 18 million acres stretching approximately 600 miles.
It will be known as the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor and will stretch from southwestern Utah to southern California, encompassing areas significant to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples—as well as protecting dozens of plant and animal species.
