This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 1st, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Most people have no idea how much land the federal government owns

or how that land is regularly put to use.

So when a president uses powers expressly given to him in order to remove or create special

protections, it raises the question, should the President really have that power?

Jonathan Wood is with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

We spoke last month in Phoenix.

As we record this, it was about two years ago that the president removed certain protections

that had been granted previously to federal lands, and he did this under a pretty straightforward logic provided by the Antiquities Act.

And this had a lot of environmentalists in particular up in arms because it would allow multiple different

kinds of uses of these federal lands and as I told friends at the time I suspect that a lot of people now are learning for the first time that it's

legal in most cases on federal lands to make extractive use of those lands for grazing, for ranching, for timber

harvesting, and that sort of thing. So describe what the Antiquities Act does

and what power that confers to the President.

Sure, and I think you're exactly right. Most people have no idea just how much land the

federal government owns and how it's used. Most of us think of the national parks and

the places we might visit on family vacation, but most of the federal land is an area you would

never think to go and is used for things like mining, drilling, and grazing.

The Antiquities Act is a statute enacted in 1906 that gives the President the power to declare

national monuments.

And at the time, Congress thought it was giving the president a pretty narrow power to protect

...