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The Trump administration is considering removing protections for multiple national monuments across the Western United States in an effort to bolster drilling and mining on public lands, according to two people within the Interior department who are familiar with the plans.
According to the internal sources, Interior department officials have identified at least six national monument to scale back protections following the objective in the Interior department draft strategic plan that was leaked on Tuesday to make sure national monuments are “assessed and correctly sized.” The list includes Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon and Ironwood Forest in Arizona, Chuckwalla in California, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks in New Mexico, and Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah. The sources spoke to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because no final decisions had been made.
Conservation and Indigenous advocates argue that the monuments represent vital ecological and sacred cultural sites and artifacts that local communities worked for decades to protect, and there is little demand to develop mineral resources within their boundaries. Tracy Stone-Manning, the new head of The Wilderness Society and the former director of the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden said, “They opened up Grand Staircase under the previous [Trump] administration and the coal market did not rush in, the oil and gas market did not rush in, nobody rushed in. There are plenty of minerals elsewhere. This is about an ideological battle.”
New blog: The devil is in the details when it comes to building affordable housing on public lands
In a new blog post, Center for Western Priorities Communications Manager Kate Groetzinger dives into the details of the complicated issue of affordable housing and public lands. Groetzinger writes, "Without proper guardrails to ensure affordability and contain sprawl, turning public land over to developers will do nothing to bring down housing costs." In March, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management told the press that his agency is looking into the suitability of selling public lands within a 10-mile radius of towns in the West for housing development. An analysis by the Center for American Progress of the 10 Western states with the most BLM-managed land found that less than one percent of that land is located within 10 miles of the states’ significant population centers. “Efforts to build housing on public lands that don’t include meaningful density and affordability requirements are nothing more than a Trojan horse to privatize a vital public asset that increases quality of life for everyone, regardless of income, in the West,” Groetzinger writes.
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Given the Administration’s ongoing illegal funding freezes, assault on the federal workforce, haphazard cancellation of building leases, and other efforts to throw agencies into total chaos and paralyze the federal government, we cannot take any such reorganization as a serious attempt to improve efficiency.”
