SALT LAKE CITY – President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Monday, shrinking two of Utah’s national monuments – Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Trump previously cut the size of the two monuments in 2017 during his first presidency. However, then-President Joe Biden restored the monuments’ sizes in 2021.
This week’s orders strip about 1.24 million acres of land from Bears Ears and 1.7 million acres from Grand Staircase-Escalante, shrinking each monument by about 90%.
Bears Ears’ new size sits at 121,096 acres. Grand Staircase-Escalante now sits at 181,541 acres.
Both monuments were created under the Antiquities Act, — Grand Staircase-Escalante by President Bill Clinton in 1996, Bears Ears by President Barack Obama in 2016. Biden used the same law to restore their boundaries in 2021.
In the orders, Trump said Biden’s restoration suffered from “several flaws,” arguing the monuments protect “generic and common” features, not “objects of historic or scientific interest.”
Trump’s orders also argue the monuments are too large, violating the Antiquities Act’s requirement that a national monument be confined to the “smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
The orders open up the land removed from the monuments to mining.
“Modifying the Monument’s boundaries will help ensure that adequate domestic supplies exist, thereby reducing the threat posed by our Nation’s reliance on foreign sources,” read both orders.
Utah’s GOP backs the cuts
Utah’s all-Republican congressional delegation — Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis and Reps. Celeste Maloy, Burgess Owens, Blake Moore, and Mike Kennedy — along with Gov. Spencer Cox and Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz (R-Hooper), stood behind Trump as he signed the orders on Monday.
“We definitely care about protecting these antiquities and will continue to do so. The problem is with these giant monument designations; there are no resources that come with those,” Cox said during the signing.
Lee echoed Trump’s criticism of the monuments’ sizes and said that Presidents Obama, Clinton, and Biden had overlooked the standards of the Antiquities Act.
“President Trump is fixing that today,” Lee said on Monday.
Curtis said he wants land management of the land to go back to the state.
“Utahns will tell you they love these lands. They manage them better than people 2,000 miles away.” Curtis said at the signing.
Backlash builds
Trump’s 2017 cuts drew lawsuits from a coalition of conservation groups, including the locally-based Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA).
Those cases were shelved once Biden restored the monuments in 2021.
This time, SUWA’s executive director Scott Braden said the group is heading back to court.
“These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation,” he wrote in a statement.
The cuts were also condemned by the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of Tribal Nations advocating for the long-term protection of the monument.
“To find ourselves here again is deeply heartbreaking. Grand Staircase-Escalante is far more than a landscape, it is an ancestral homeland that holds our sacred places, plant medicines, waters, wildlife, and living history…. Our connection to this place cannot be erased by the stroke of a pen,” Davina Smith-Idjesa, a representative for the coalition, wrote in a statement.
Utah House Minority Leader Angela Romero (D-Salt Lake) also decried Trump’s cuts and said in a statement that the land deserves the protection offered under national monument status and pointing to tribal history.
“Less than a decade ago, the Trump administration reduced protections for these same monuments despite overwhelming public support and the objections of the Tribal Nations whose ancestors have lived on these lands for thousands of years,” Romero wrote.
The cuts land amid an active crisis inside Bears Ears itself: the Babylon Fire, the largest wildfire currently burning in the US, has scorched more than 106,000 acres of the monument since breaking out June 26 and was only half-contained when Trump signed the orders. The blaze has forced closures across Bears Ears and the Needles district of neighboring Canyonlands National Park through the end of August.
