This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 12th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal government already owns a staggering amount of US land and is now rethinking

what to do with dozens of federal

monuments within those lands.

Anna Downey is a research fellow with the Property and Environment

Research Center. We talked about what makes a national monument and

what the feds ought to do with those massive

land holdings.

The federal government owns a huge, like a gallingly huge amount of US territory and in particular in the 13 Western states

the government owns roughly half of the ground in those states.

So what challenges does that pose

for states that want to have any role in managing or in some cases profiting from those lands?

Yeah, with the federal government owning over half the land in the Western United States, it poses this really interesting

juxtaposition between state and federal

and input.

lands being put into a pretty restrictive designations,

largely national monuments and national parks and areas where the local

communities who rely largely on grazing or timber or oil and gas, mining even.

They're seeing their traditional uses on these lands

kind of being locked up and they're having a difficulty

with how do they then proceed and how do they

...