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Four National Monuments Cover 10,000 Square Miles, And This Group Wants Them Gone
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A group of 37 free-market organizations, trade associations, businesses, former federal officials and current lawmakers signed and sent a letter Wednesday requesting that President Donald Trump completely rescind four national monuments.
The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) sent the letter to the White House in response to an August Department of Interior review of 22 national monuments. The Washington Post obtained an early draft of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s report, which recommends changes to six designations and rollbacks to four others.
“In keeping with President Trump’s campaign pledge to undo the harm massive national monument designations have inflicted on rural areas in the West and Maine, as well as fishing communities along the Northeast coast, the White House needs to take bold action,” NCPPR Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen said in a statement. “Just trimming around the edges, as Secretary Zinke has proposed, won’t do.”
The NCPPR letter calls for full repeal of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a marine monument off the coast of New England. All four monuments together cover 10,127 square miles.
The White House is expected to come out with a final decision on the monument review, either adopting or altering Zinke’s proposed changes, although no date has been set.
The letter also calls on Congress to repeal or reform the president’s authority under the Antiquities Act to designate national monuments.
“In what is a complete distortion of the Antiquities Act’s original intent, monument designations — whether on land or at sea — frequently involve thousands of square miles that are permanently off-limits to almost all economic activity,” the letter states. “It is time for this unconstitutional practice to end.”
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