A New Mexico senator and Minnesota congresswoman are asking for an investigation of whether the Interior Department broke the law in conducting studies about possibly leasing land for oil and gas drilling in original boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
President Donald Trump cut 900,000 acres of the then-1.9 million acre monument in 2017, a move heralded by Utah’s GOP leaders but one that brought a swift rebuke by environmental groups who immediately sued the president.
The Bureau of Land Management, which maintains the monument area, has been in the process of creating a management plan for the region, which now includes three smaller monuments. One of the four potential management plans identified some 660,000 acres for possible leasing.
But a little-noticed provision tacked on to every budget for the Interior Department since 2002 says that it cannot use any taxpayer money to conduct pre-leasing studies on lands contained in monuments as they existed on Jan. 20, 2001...