Trump Slashes Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by 90% in Largest Public-Lands Rollback Ever
A pair of executive orders cut roughly 3 million acres from the two Utah monuments, shrinking them to a fraction of their size as tribal nations say they were never consulted.
President Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Monday to dramatically shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, cutting roughly 3 million acres — about 90% of their protected area — in what conservation groups called the largest rollback of public-land protections in U.S. history.
Under the orders, Bears Ears is reduced to about 121,000 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante to roughly 182,000 acres, a fraction of the more than 3 million acres the two monuments had covered. The move reopens vast stretches of red-rock canyon country — long prized for its Indigenous cultural sites, fossils and wilderness — to potential mining, drilling and other development.
The signing followed a familiar pattern for the two monuments, which have become a political tug-of-war spanning three presidencies. In 2017, during his first term, Trump shrank Bears Ears from about 1.35 million acres to roughly 228,000 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante from about 1.87 million acres to roughly 1 million acres. President Joe Biden restored both to their original boundaries in 2021, to applause from tribes and conservationists and frustration from Utah Republicans.
Utah's all-Republican congressional delegation, Gov. Spencer Cox and state House Speaker Mike Schultz gathered around the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office for the closed-door signing, which the White House live-streamed on YouTube. Utah officials have long argued that the sprawling monuments locked up land and hobbled local economies, and they cheered the reductions as a return of control to the state.
Tribal nations reacted with fury. Members of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition issued a lengthy statement condemning the decision to "virtually eliminate" the monuments. "Our Tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that's unacceptable," said Autumn Gillard, the coalition's coordinator and a descendant of the Cedar Band of Paiutes. "The federal government must honor its Trust and Treaty obligations to our Tribes — it is not optional."
Legal challenges are all but certain. Courts have never definitively resolved whether a president who can create monuments under the Antiquities Act also has the power to gut them, and the earlier round of litigation over Trump's first-term cuts was rendered moot when Biden reversed them. This time, conservation groups, tribes and Democratic officials have signaled they are ready to fight the reductions in court, setting up a legal battle that could determine the future of some of the most contested land in the American West.
Originally reported by Deseret News.