Eds. note: This story was written on Friday. On Monday morning, the Supreme Court announced it would not hear a lawsuit from the state of Utah that claimed Utah should get control of half of the federal land in the state.

Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) With two big events occurring at the federal level within the next week, public land advocates are warning that federal public lands are once again under threat.

Remembering what the Trump administration tried to do with public lands four years ago, public land organizations and attorneys are closely watching events in the three branches of federal government that are coinciding with Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.

In the judicial branch, the Supreme Court is supposed to decide soon on whether it will hear a lawsuit from the state of Utah. Utah has asked the court to bypass the lower federal courts and hear its argument that the federal government is Constitutionally required to transfer about half of the 37.4 million federal acres in Utah to the state, most of which are managed by the Bureau of Land Management. But Utah’s own Constitution declares that it would “forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands” within its borders.

Utah’s legal claims have been widely discredited by scholars, said Chris Winter, public lands attorney and executive director of the University of Colorado Law School Getches-Wilkinson Center, a law policy institute, during a press conference Friday.

“So many of us are very skeptical of Utah’s pending lawsuit,” Winter said. “Its claim in the Supreme Court is widely viewed as an opportunistic move to take advantage of a newly conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”

Should the Supreme Court agree to hear the case and then side with Utah, millions of acres in the West could potentially be opened up to exploitation of mineral, fossil-fuel, timber and grazing resources, said Laura Peterson, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney.

“Utah politicians have taken every opportunity to weaken public land protections, whether it be through litigation or legislation,” Peterson said. “While the state has tried to downplay the impact of this lawsuit before the Supreme Court and refers to those 18.5 million acres of public lands it’s after as merely ‘unappropriated lands,’ they, in fact, include some of the most spectacular and well-known landscapes in Utah. And make no mistake, if President-elect Trump again legally reduces or eliminates Grand Staircase and Bears Ears national monuments, these lands also become unappropriated.”

During his first term as president, at the behest of Utah's two GOP senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, Trump issued proclamations in December 2017 drastically reducing the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments in Utah that were designated by previous presidents under the Antiquities Act.

In October 2021, President Joe Biden restored the boundaries of the two monuments. Recently, Biden has used the Antiquities Act to designate two additional national monuments: the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments, which together will protect 848,000 acres of lands in California.

Congressman Jared Huffman, D-California, has sat on the House Natural Resources committee for 12 years and saw some of the changes Republicans tried to make during the first Trump administration, including repealing of national monument designations and trying to dismantle the Endangered Species Act, which limits development in critical species habitat.

On Friday, Huffman said he anticipates Trump and the Congressional majority in Congress will try again, based on the policies outlined in the Project 2025 document developed by far-right think tanks. Project 2025 seeks to repeal the Antiquities Act and reverse conservation decisions from the Biden administration, including removing protections in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska and the Boundary Waters Wilderness in Minnesota.

On Jan. 3, the House of Representatives passed a package of rules for the new 119th Congress. Included an obscure provision that makes it easier for Congress to transfer public lands because conveyance of the land won’t affect revenues or spending. It essentially removes any monetary value from public land, setting it up for a give away.

“We know that all of (the Biden administration’s actions) goes against the Republican goals to essentially redefine what conservation means. Their public lands agenda is about opening up all these special places for extraction, for polluting industries to plunder. The truth is we’re once again entering an historically dire moment with an administration that has shown they’re going to ignore science, they’re going to prioritize industry’s polluter playbook at every turn,” Huffman said.

These are all aspects that threaten federal land, but public lands advocates say the biggest threat is Congress continuing to cut the budgets of land and wildlife management agencies. Although this has already been going on for several years, Winter said the trend of deep cuts is likely to continue, especially after Trump assigned Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as leaders of an unofficial organization titled the “Department of Government Efficiency” tasked with cutting “wasteful” spending.

Both Huffman and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-NM, who sits on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said they will be working to pass budgets that keep the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture at a sustainable level. In December, Congress passed a continuing resolution to use the current budget until March 14, at which time Congress must either pass a new budget or another continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown.

“I want to make sure that baseline funding for all of our federal public land agencies is improved, and that’s going to be a big fight in the coming Congress,” Huffman said.

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.