A week after the White House indicated it would eliminate two national monuments in California, many remain unsure whether President Trump has actually revoked the lands’ protected status.
Mr. Trump announced last Friday that he would rescind a proclamation signed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. a week before he left office that established the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments, which encompassed more than 848,000 acres of desert and mountainous land.
The White House then released a fact sheet that included a bullet point stating that Mr. Trump would be “terminating proclamations” declaring monuments that safeguarded “vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production.”
The New York Times confirmed last Saturday that Mr. Trump had indeed rescinded that proclamation. But later that day, the bullet point listing termination of national monuments disappeared from the White House fact sheet.
A post on X sent by a verified White House account last week still included the terminations of national monuments, and has not been edited or removed as of Saturday morning.
The White House declined to answer questions about the discrepancy.
“We were obviously very disappointed to see that fact sheet go up and then confused to see it come back down,” Mark Green, the executive director of CalWild, a nonprofit in California that advocates for wild spaces on public lands. “There’s very little clarity about what’s going on, and there’s such a lack of transparency with this administration that it’s just really hard to know what’s happening.”