“We’ve designated new monuments and historic sites that better reflect the story of all our people,” President Obama recently boasted at Yosemite National Park.
What he’s referring to is the White House’s authority to classify large swaths of land as national monuments based on an obscure provision in the 1906 Antiquities Act. With that designation, the federal government can restrict all sorts of activities on the land, including ranching, off-roading, and energy production—disregarding the wishes of local communities. Obama can effectively rope off millions of acres of land in states like California and Utah without congressional approval.
The Obama administration does so diligently: It has already set aside over 265 million acres of land, more territory than any other president in history. During his two terms, the president has added 22 sites to the National Park System under the Antiquities Act.
But federal oversight of America’s lands leaves plenty to be desired. A recent analysis from the Property and Environment Research Center found that the federal government loses billions of dollars a year caring for land under its control—now nearly 30 percent of the entire country. For every dollar spent on land management, the federal government only recoups 73 cents in revenue. Recent estimates show the National Park Service (NPS) has more than $11 billion in deferred maintenance, while the U.S. Forest Service has more than $300 million in backlogged trail repairs.
NPS is also under fire for allegations of mismanagement and sexual harassment. The chief park ranger at Florida’s Canaveral National Seashore, for instance, was accused of sexually harassing women on three separate cases in two years; yet he still works at the park. “The department does not do well in holding employees accountable who engage in misconduct,” Interior Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall explained. “Often, management avoids discipline altogether.”
But the Obama administration continues plugging away with monument declarations. It represents the president’s “keep it in the ground” stance on fossil fuels, which has led to a decrease of production on federal lands. While the country is in the midst of an energy revolution, the growth has come almost exclusively on state and private land. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, between 2009 and 2013, oil production increased by 61 percent on state and private lands, but actually dropped 6 percent on federal lands. Natural gas production rose by a third on state and private land during that same time period, but plummeted on federal lands by 28 percent.
Federal lands could provide a tremendous economic boon. A study by Timothy Considine, a professor of energy economics at the University of Wyoming, found opening federal lands could lead to $26.5 billion in annual gross regional product, more than $5 billion in tax revenue and more than 200,000 jobs in the Rocky Mountain region alone. But a small contingent of radical environmental groups blindly opposed to fossil fuels has convinced the president to lock up these resources.
And in an effort to drown out local opposition, left-wing activists have gone to extreme lengths to cloak their appearance.
A group called the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) and a handful of other supposed hunter-advocate organizations recently released a report extolling the virtues of the Antiquities Act as a powerful conservation tool and praised Obama for his use of executive power.
In order to make up for lack of actual support among the American people for federal land grabs, environmental and left-wing foundations have dumped millions of dollars into groups that claim to represent hunters and anglers, using them to create a false grassroots image behind the use—or abuse—of presidential powers.
As an example, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers—one of the report’s supporters—receives the lion’s share of its funding not from grassroots sportsmen but from environmentalists such as Wyss Foundation, which also donates heavily to radical activists at the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice (the “law firm of the environment”)—which oppose affordable energy development in favor of unreliable and expensive wind and solar energy.
TRCP, meanwhile, gets most of its money from environmentalists and Big Labor, according to tax records.
In 2010, leaked documents from the Obama administration identified more than a dozen sites covering 13 million acres as potential new targets for monument designation.
In other words, the problem is only getting worse. And not much can be done unless Congress rolls back President Obama’s overreaching executive power.
Will Coggin is director of research at the Environmental Policy Alliance, a project of the nonprofit Center for Organizational Research and Education.
