House Republicans are ramping up efforts to reform the Antiquities Act six months before the conclusion of the Biden administration, when many fear the retiring president will rope off millions more acres of public lands with monument protections on his way out of office.
On Tuesday, the Congressional Western Caucus held a forum to discuss the Congressional Oversight of the Antiquities Act, introduced by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks last September. The bill requires congressional approval of new national monuments designated by the president within six months of the establishing order or the end of the incumbent congressional term.
“I don’t know what to expect,” Western Caucus Vice Chair Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, told The Federalist, but she added that new monument protections “do tend to happen at the end of Democrat administrations.”
Since the Antiquities Act became law in 1906, presidents have used their executive authority to bypass Congress in order to protect specific sites of cultural and historic significance. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first to use the power with the designation of roughly 1,300 acres surrounding Devil’s Tower in Wyoming as a protected monument. The century-old law, however, has been increasingly abused by far-left administrations eager to score cheap political points with their so-called environmentalist base, who demand large swaths of public land remain untouched.
In May, President Joe Biden expanded two national monuments in California by more than 120,000 acres, an area larger than that of the state’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. While a national park is a large area protected
