President Trump won the White House for many reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason is that rural Americans are sick and tired of rich coastal elites telling them how to live their lives.

President Trump may not be able to fulfill all of his campaign promises, but he has already delivered for Utah’s rural communities by coming to our state and limiting President Obama’s Bears Ears National Monument and President Clinton’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Make no mistake: President Obama’s Bears Ears monument was a project pushed and funded by wealthy East and West Coast liberals. The Hewlett and Packard foundations, as well as the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, gave tens of millions of dollars to supposedly “grassroots” Native American groups to campaign for a new monument.

But local Native Americans—the people who actually live near Bears Ears and use the land—did not take the money.

“The whole tone of it seems like the tribes are generally being used as pawns for the environmental groups to get what they really want,” Blue Mountain Dine’ Vice President Byron Clarke told the Deseret News. “They are being played. It is somewhat insulting.”

“It seems pretty clear that the federal government over time tends to close down access,” Clarke later told me. “So just as a local user of the land, I have to ask myself what’s wrong with how we are using it right now? We can go hunt now, we can go fishing and cut wood now and it’s pristine.”

Clarke is right. The federal government does restrict access to land where a national monument has been declared. That is the entire point of the Antiquities Act: to preserve cultural treasures on federal public land by restricting access to the land.

That is also why the Antiquities Act requires that monument designations be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and maintenance of the objects to be protected.”

Neither President Clinton nor President Obama respected that limitation. Instead of responsibly working with local communities to identify just the protections needed to preserve cultural sites in San Juan and Garfield counties, they made million acre designations that were designed to transform the economic life of surrounding residents.

“Creation of jobs for tourism will be a benefit to the community versus those that could be lost by some of the mineral and energy jobs,” Clarke told me. “I think for a lot of Navajos we are skilled people, we have skills other than restaurant workers and gas station attendants. We are engineers. We are heavy equipment operators. We are welders. Those are good jobs rather than the tourism type jobs which tend to be seasonal.”

Ranching families also are hit hard by the restrictions that come with monument designations. After land-use restrictions at the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument kicked in, Garfield County ranchers could no longer bring water in to their cattle. Their ability to fence in water resources and maintain roads was also limited. Many families were forced to signigicantly reduce their herds, sometimes by half.

The corporations pushing for monument land-use restrictions, like Patagonia and REI, claim that the monuments will create tourism jobs for the residents of Garfield and San Juan county. And they are right: the monuments do create tourism jobs.

But at what cost?

Moab resident Jon Kovash warns in the High Country Times that “Tourism also brings sprawling growth, crappy jobs, even-higher rents and home prices, and an increasingly unmanageable crush of visitors and traffic.”

Maybe the rich coastal liberals and their corporate pals are right. Maybe tourism is the answer for economic development in rural America.

But shouldn’t that choice be made by the residents who live there?

Shouldn’t the people who actually live near the land decide how best to use it?

And maybe, just maybe, the same people who used land restrictions in their own cities to create sky-high housing prices and crushing inequality shouldn’t be in the business of telling other people how to use their land.

More needs to be done to protect Utah’s rural communities from future Democratic presidents. We need Congress to give Utah the same Antiquities Act protections that Alaska and Wyoming have.

But until then, President Trump’s monument reductions are a good first step. Utah thanks him.

Earlier this month, President Trump told a conservative audience at the Heritage Foundation, “While I commend the bipartisan work done by Senators Alexander and Murray — and I do commend it — I continue to believe Congress must find a solution to the Obamacare mess instead of providing bailouts to insurance companies.”

The proponents of the Alexander-Murray health care bill have since tried to make the case that their legislation does not provide a billion-dollar taxpayer windfall to insurance companies. However, a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the legislation released earlier this week shows that is exactly what the legislation does.

The main component of the Alexander-Murray health care bill is an explicit appropriation for “Cost-Sharing Reduction” payments to insurance companies totaling approximately $18 billion from 2018 and 2019. The supposed purpose of this payout is to lower out-of-pocket health care costs for Obamacare customers.

These CSR payments were created by the Affordable Care Act in 2010, but Congress never appropriated money to fund the payments. Then in an illegal abuse of power, President Obama made the payments anyway. The House of Representatives eventually sued to stop him.

While President Trump continued to make CSR payments during the initial months of his presidency, a federal judge ruled this May that the payments were illegal. The Trump administration announced they would end the payments just this month.

According to the CBO, if CSR payments did end this month and Alexander-Murray did not become law, then insurance premiums eventually would rise for those buying insurance through the Obamacare exchanges. But since the vast majority of people buying insurance on the exchange also get subsidies, the actual price paid by many consumers would go down and the number of Americans with health insurance would go up.

If Alexander-Murray did become law, according to a new CBO report this week, premiums for 2019 would be lower while 2018 premiums, which already have been set, would not change. Insurers would still get CSR payments for 2018 even though many of them assumed they would not be getting CSR payments when they set their rates.

By allowing insurers to set rates without knowing they would get CSR payments, and then paying them CSR payments anyway, Alexander-Murray is a multi-billion-dollar windfall for health insurance companies.

Proponents of Alexander-Murray claim this insurer bailout is worth it because the bill also includes more flexibility for states and consumers. But nothing in the CBO report indicates that this new flexibility would do anything to lower premiums for consumers.

Shoveling billions of taxpayer dollars to health insurance companies that are already enjoying record-high profits is not a step in the right direction on health care reform. What American families really need is real regulatory relief from Obamacare’s draconian Title I regulations.

Only when states and families are allowed to set policies and choose insurance coverage that makes sense for them will we see meaningful decline in health insurance premiums.

Violent crime did increase in the United States in 2016.

But not everywhere.

Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis have all suffered a large increase in murders the past few years, while communities like Omaha, Austin, and Miami have seen crime go down.

There are many explanations for why crime increased in some cities but declined in others, including the opioid epidemic and gangs. But there is another explanation for why some cities have seen large spikes in violent crimes: Their residents no longer trust the criminal justice system.

“There are any number of theories on what causes crime rates to swell, but nearly everyone agrees that public trust is essential to successful law enforcement,” Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. “Police alone cannot reduce crime. Community partnerships, joint problem solving and open communication with the public are critical. When those links are weak, police are less effective, particularly at preventing crime.”

Chief Beck’s wisdom is corroborated by a 2016 survey of more than 2,000 Americans. That study found that 81% of people with a high level of trust in police said they would definitely report a crime, compared to just 54% of people with low trust.

In other words, if a community does not believe their criminal justice system is fair, then they are far less likely to cooperate with that system. And when a community does not cooperate with law enforcement, crime goes up.

That is why this week I cosponsored three criminal justice reform bills—the Smarter Sentencing Act, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, and the Mens Rea Reform Act.

The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017 is a bipartisan bill that would eliminate mandatory life sentences for three-strike drug offenses, give judges discretion when sentencing non-violent drug offenders, and allow federal prisons to create more programs to reduce recidivism.

The Smarter Sentencing Act of 2017 would give judges additional discretion when sentencing non-violent drug offenders and allows for more cases in which judges have to retroactively reduce sentences for non-violent offenders.

The Mens Rea Act of 2017 would require federal prosecutors to prove defendants actually had criminal intent when they violated a federal statute.

I would proudly vote for any of these bills, individually or packaged together, because I believe reforming our criminal justice system is good policy—and a moral imperative.

The United States has experienced a 500 percent increase in the number of inmates in federal custody since 1980. Almost 50 percent of those federal inmates are serving sentences for drug offenses.

Mandatory sentences, particularly drug sentences, can force judges to impose one-size-fits-all sentences without taking into account the details of individual cases. Frequently, the results of these policies are lengthy sentences for minor non-violent drug offenses that are far longer than the sentences given to criminals convicted of rape, assault, or even murder. These sentences disproportionately affect minorities and foster distrust of the criminal justice system.

We must safeguard the legitimacy of our criminal justice system by ensuring that the punishment fits the crime, while continuing to protect the public. Each of these bills is a step toward that ultimate goal.

If we can ensure that time given to criminals matches the crimes they commit, I am confident trust will be restored in our criminal justice system and crime rates will fall again.

When Democrats passed Obamacare on a party-line vote in March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that by 2016, 21 million people would receive health insurance through the law's exchanges. In reality, just 10 million people did.

The CBO's model was off by more than 100 percent.

The same CBO estimate predicted that Medicaid would grow by 17 million enrollees to about 52 million. In reality, more than 34 million people have signed up for Medicaid since Obamacare became law, for a total of 74.5 million recipients today.

Again, the CBO's model was off by around 100 percent.

Now the CBO wants us to believe, based on the same models, that just repealing Obamacare's individual mandate, without a single dime's worth of cuts to Medicaid, would cause more than 7 million people to abandon their Medicaid coverage.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of the quality of healthcare that lower-income Americans receive through Medicaid, but why would 7 million voluntarily give up Medicaid coverage they receive for free? These CBO projections, and others like it, strain the boundaries of common sense.

When it comes to topics like the effectiveness of the individual mandate, there are sharp disagreements among experts. That's why, in the academic community, scholars have to "show their work" by publicly disclosing their data, estimates, and analysis to scholarly scrutiny, and most importantly, refinement and improvement.

Congress does need a scorekeeper to provide budgetary estimates for the policy changes it considers. But at a bare minimum, that scorekeeper should be forced to show how its models work. Currently the CBO doesn't have to do that. It's a "black box," a secret formula even Congress can't be allowed to see, yet which the House and Senate must treat as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai.

It's an indefensible situation.

That is why I have introduced the CBO Show Your Work Act of 2017. This bill would require the CBO to publish its data, models, and all details of computation used in its cost analysis and scoring. CBO would keep its role as official scorekeeper of congressional budget proposals – but now the public and the economic community would be able to see what's going on in all those spreadsheets and algorithms.

That is, it would hold CBO to the same standard the American Economic Association's "Data Availability Policy" sets for all academic economists: requiring all paper authors to ensure their data "are readily available to any researcher for purposes of replication."

Consider again Obamacare's individual mandate. President Barack Obama opposed an individual mandate while campaigning in 2008, but saw the light later when the CBO started scoring Obamacare drafts.

A 2009 memo written by then-White House health adviser Nancy-Ann DeParle informed the president, "Based on our policy analysis, we believe that a weak requirement for all Americans to have insurance may come close to achieving the maximum coverage that can be achieved through aggressive outreach and auto-enrollment. Unfortunately, however, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will likely take the position that without an individual responsibility requirement, half of the uninsured will be left uncovered."

Following this memo, Obama chose to substitute the CBO's policy judgment for his own. The individual mandate became a pillar of the largest policy change in a generation.

Policymakers need data and data analysis to do their jobs. But to do their jobs well, they need the best analysis. And centuries of practical experience tell us that transparency and replicability are essential to the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge. There is simply no serious argument for insulating the most influential economic modelers in the United States from the academic standards that govern everyone from Nobel Prize-winning physicists to second graders "carrying the one" as they learn long addition.

We can do better as a Congress and a nation. We are never going to agree on what the best healthcare, tax, or energy policies should be. But when we make our arguments about the costs and benefits of our preferred policies, we should at least be willing to explain how and why our policies would work.

Making the CBO show its own work would be a great first step.

Op-ed originally published in the Washington Examiner