The national monument yo-yo is once more in full swing.
President Donald Trump on Monday declared the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears monuments officially shrunken once more.
But the argument here should be as much about the process leading to the sizes of these monuments as the size themselves.
The Antiquities Act, passed by Congress in 1906, gives presidents power to create monuments without any involvement by Congress. That is wholly inadequate for today’s hyperpartisan age.
How we got here
If you’re keeping score, President Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument in 1996, famously making the announcement from Arizona, not Utah. President Barack Obama declared the Bears Ears Monument in 2016. Then, in his first term, Trump contracted both monuments with the stroke of a pen. President Joe Biden subsequently expanded them again.
And now, in his second term, Trump has again contracted them.
This up-and-down cycle benefits no one. As the Deseret News previously reported, the Bureau of Land Management has concluded there are few oil or gas extraction possibilities in either monument. Even if there were, no credible extraction company would invest in mining operations, knowing that a future Democratic president is likely to expand the monuments again.
This is no way to settle land issues in a republic.
The Antiquities Act was considered necessary in 1906 because Native American artifacts were quickly disappearing from ruins in the American West. In 1903, the New York Times had reported that many of these artifacts were seen for sale at shops in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Fair.
Proponents of the law believed the president needed to be nimble enough to protect such artifacts through the rapid creation of national monuments. They attached one condition. Any president’s declaration was to be “confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
It didn’t take long for this vague language to be exploited. In time, two states were able to secure exemptions from the act. Wyoming got one after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a monument at Jackson Hole in 1943 to provide an extension of Grand Teton National Park, which Congress had rejected. Alaska got the other in 1978, after President Jimmy Carter proclaimed a 56-million-acre monument that incensed many locals.
Get Congress involved
The merits of these and many other monuments, including those in Utah, are up for debate. But it ought to be obvious that these decisions are best decided by the people’s representatives. Anything less leads to endless debates, and perhaps endless contractions and expansions.
In Utah, 66.5% of the land is owned by the federal government, making the state particularly vulnerable to impacts from environmental decisions in Washington.
Rep. Celeste Maloy has long been a proponent of changing the Antiquities Act. “Congress, not the executive branch, has jurisdiction to make decisions on public land,” she said last year. “Congress trusted presidents with a narrow authority to declare national monuments in the Antiquities Act. Unfortunately, presidents have continued to abuse that narrow authority to designate millions of acres of land in Utah and across the West without proper congressional oversight.”
Maloy co-sponsored a bill that would have removed the act’s authority to create monuments from the president and given it to Congress. She and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, believe local residents should have more control over the land.
On Monday, Lee said, “For too long, presidents have weaponized monument designations to lock up millions of acres, close roads, restrict grazing and cut rural communities off from lands their families have lived on and worked for generations.”
Maloy has tried unsuccessfully to undo the most recent resource management plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument.
Republicans may be happy with Trump’s actions Monday, but there are no guarantees that it will be the last word. Congress must debate and then act in the best interest of Utahns and the nation to protect both land and antiquities and the ability to meet the evolving energy needs of the country.