December 17, 2024 — President Joe Biden is facing a wave of campaigns to create new national monuments in his final weeks in office, but people both inside and outside the administration expect the outgoing president to select just a handful of key sites that have already been thoroughly vetted.
During his sole term in office, Biden has repeatedly used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate new national monuments, ranging from preserving sweeping natural landscapes to sites important to Native Americans to those that memorialize Black history in this country.
Earlier this week, he declared his seventh new national monument, recognizing the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, and acknowledging the government’s role in attempting to eradicate tribal culture through a boarding school system run by the Interior Department.