New research in the era of Donald Trump suggests presidents shouldn’t have so much say in using the Antiquities Act to designate future national monuments – those giant swaths of land deemed national treasures to be protected from development.

Trump has sought to shrink some for the benefit of nature resource development and grazing, such the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah not far from the Four Corners it shares with Colorado.

The policy paper for the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University looked at two times Congress got involved with limiting a president’s power over public lands via the Antiquities Act – in 1950 in Wyoming and 1980 in Alaska.

RELATED: Colorado-based uranium company played a role in reducing national monument

The policy paper, called “Monumental Debate,” suggests that Congress gets more involved in managing federal lands when it limits the president’s power, and the a 5,000-acre limit on national monuments that can be designated by the president hasn’t been challenged in almost 40 years.

The paper’s author is Jonathan Wood, a senior attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which gets support from conservative advocacy organizations linked to the Kochs and Scaifes.

Wood is a member of the executive board of the Federalist Society’s Environmental Law and Property Rights Practice Group, and publishes the FREEcology on what’s characterized as “libertarian environmentalism.”

Wood notes in the paper that federal lands are protected by many federal laws adopted since the Antiquities Act was created, “reducing the need for controversial presidential action to ensure adequate protection.”

Jessica Goad, the deputy director of Conservation Colorado, the state’s largest environmental organization and chief advocate for public lands, wasn’t onboard with the findings, Trump or not.

“This report is just another short-sighted attack on our public lands,” she told Colorado Politics on Tuesday, which marked the 113th anniversary of the Antiquities Act. “Instead of restricting authorities to protect lands, we must use every tool in the toolbox to protect Colorado and America’s last remaining wild places.”

Goad talked about the importance of the act.

“The Antiquities Act is a foundational public lands law that has resulted in the protection of American treasures like the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty and Colorado icons like the Great Sand Dunes and Canyons of the Ancients,” she said. “Without it and the timely action of past presidents, who knows what fate would have befallen these places.”

You can read the policy paper by clicking here.

Last year, as Trump sought to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet joined with 20 other Democrats to try to block him.

Called the America’s Natural Treasures of Immeasurable Quality Unite, Inspire, and Together Improve the Economies of States (ANTIQUITIES) Act of 2018 the bill went nowhere in the Republican-controlled Senate, however.