1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

As your constituent, I am writing to urge you to defend our national monuments and assert Congress's constitutional authority over federal public lands. On July 13, the administration signed proclamations cutting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by nearly 3 million acres combined, roughly a 90% reduction for each. This is not the first time. The same thing happened in 2017, was reversed by the next administration, and is now happening again. This cycle leaves rural communities, tribal nations, and outdoor businesses with no stable ground to plan on. Here is why immediate Congressional action matters to our community: - Reclaiming Congress's Role: Congress created the Antiquities Act and gave the President authority to designate monuments. It never actually gave any President the power to unilaterally erase or shrink them by proclamation alone. Letting one administration reverse the work of another by executive order, over and over, means no protection is ever permanent and no local community can plan for the future. - Fueling Our $1.3 Trillion Outdoor Economy: Outdoor recreation generated $1.3 trillion in economic output and supported 5.2 million American jobs in 2024. Protecting public lands drives sustainable local tourism and small business growth—value that far outweighs one-time, speculative resource extraction that leaves local communities with the cleanup. - Preserving Access for Sportsmen and Families: Protected public lands belong to everyday citizens. Keeping these acres intact ensures hunters, anglers, hikers, and local families retain guaranteed access to our shared natural heritage, rather than seeing it fenced off for mineral leases. - Safeguarding Sacred Cultural Sites: These lands contain irreplaceable ancient artifacts, cliff dwellings, and sacred tribal grounds that risk permanent damage or looting once protections are lifted and new access roads and claims move in. These monuments were not designated on a whim. Bears Ears protects thousands of archaeological sites and remains sacred to five tribal nations who fought for decades to see it protected. Grand Staircase-Escalante preserves some of the last truly wild, undeveloped landscape in the lower 48. Handing nearly 3 million acres away by executive proclamation, without a single vote in Congress, isn't "local control"—it's a single executive overriding decades of work by tribal nations, local communities, and scientists. The proclamations explicitly cite uranium, oil, and gas access as the rationale. The winners here aren't the public; they are the exact mining and energy corporations whose internal lobbying maps shaped these cutbacks in the first place. I ask that you: 1. Support legislation that codifies and protects existing national monument boundaries. 2. Pass commonsense legislation clarifying that shrinking or revoking a national monument requires an Act of Congress, not a unilateral proclamation. 3. Ensure federal lands remain in public hands rather than opened to speculative corporate leasing. Our public lands are not a political football to be handed back and forth every time the White House changes hands, and they are not a resource to be quietly traded away to whoever lobbies hardest. Please stand up for the constitutional separation of powers, our outdoor economy, and the future of America's heritage.