Two Democratic senators questioned if President Trump has the authority to slash two national monuments in Utah to 40 percent of their current size, and said the USDA did not recommend removing national forest land from them. Trump is expected to announce the new boundaries for the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments today during a visit to Salt Lake City.
Trump reportedly will shrink Bears Ears, in southeastern Utah, to 201,397 acres from its current 1.35 million acres, a step sure to affect 289,000 acres of national forest inside the monument’s boundaries. The administration’s nominee to become USDA’s head lawyer, Steve Vaden, told the Senate Agriculture Committee in early November that “no specific areas were recommended for removal” when USDA submitted its comments during the review ordered by Trump. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke led the examination of two dozen large national monuments created since the mid-1990s.
In a letter, Agriculture Committee members Debbie Stabenow and Michael Bennet asked the White House about the president’s plans for Bears Ears, as well as for four national monuments in California that contain national forest land and were part of the review completed last summer. The administration has released few details from the memo that Zinke sent to Trump. In a number of cases, the memo suggests that “traditional uses,” such as grazing, logging, mining and commercial fishing, should be allowed on monument land. In others, such as in Utah, it says the government should scale back the size of the monument and remove restrictions on use of the land.
“If you plan to recommend reduction of any national monuments, do you plan to seek legal authority to reduce any such national monuments?” asked Stabenow, the senior Democrat on the committee, and Bennet, the lead Democrat on the forestry subcommittee. “If not … please provide a citation for any such legal authority.”
The 1906 Antiquities Act empowered presidents to create national monuments to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest.” The law says national monuments should be “the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” A 1938 attorney general’s opinion says presidents can create the monuments but not abolish them. There are more than 100 national monuments.
Some 5,000 Utahans protested the reductions during a rally over the weekend at the Utah state Capitol, said the Salt Lake Tribune. Critics of the monuments met in Monticello, Utah, to support the reductions.
“Before Bears Ears National Monument existed, there were already efforts to get rid of it,” said the Salt Lake newspaper, describing a meeting last year, before Trump was elected, in which Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch made the case against the monument to Donald Trump Jr. “Hatch and others had already started laying the groundwork to overturn any Obama action should Trump win the White House. And when he did, the concerted, full-court press began, according to officials involved at several levels of the Utah effort.” President Obama designated Bears Ears a national monument in December 2016.