President Donald Trump has signed an executive order dramatically shrinking two sprawling national monuments in Utah, eliminating protections from nearly three million acres and clearing the way for oil and gas development on terrain that Native American tribes consider sacred.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante will each lose approximately 1.5 million acres under the order Trump signed Monday. The move reverses protections put in place by his predecessors and marks the second time Trump has targeted these designations, having previously downsized them during his first term before President Biden restored the original boundaries.
"They took the land from the people quite honestly," Trump said at the White House. "We're giving it back."
Utah's Republican Governor Spencer Cox attended the signing and praised the decision, arguing that the original monument designations vastly exceeded what the Antiquities Act permits. Under that 1906 law, presidents can grant protections to historically or archaeologically significant sites, but Cox contended that the multimillion-acre designations were oversized. "These monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation," he said.
Bears Ears, established by President Barack Obama in 2016, holds ancestral villages, burial grounds and ceremonial sites sacred to five tribes: Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute. The landscape contains hundreds of thousands of objects of cultural and archaeological importance and is jointly managed through an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies. Grand Staircase-Escalante, designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996, encompasses canyons, natural arches and rock paintings alongside significant coal reserves.
Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation citizen and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said the decision felt like betrayal. "From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land," she said. "This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors' footprints."
Smith-Idjesa accused federal officials of ignoring their legal obligation to consult with affected tribes before taking action. Tribal leaders had anticipated the cuts following Trump's election to a second term.
Environmental and legal advocates are preparing to challenge the order. Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said it would pursue legal action to restore protections. Managing attorney Heidi McIntosh called the downsizing illegal. "The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, not to destroy them," she said in a statement.
The reduction is part of a broader Trump administration strategy to unlock federal lands for resource extraction. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signaled last year that the administration would redraw monument boundaries to expand energy production. The two Utah monuments combined span more than 3.2 million acres, roughly the size of Connecticut, and contain deposits of coal, uranium and other minerals that industry seeks to access.
Trump's approach contrasts sharply with his predecessor's conservation agenda. Biden designated or expanded more than a dozen national monuments and aimed to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. Trump's policies prioritize tapping into the natural resource wealth of federal lands totaling more than 100,000 square miles, including offshore areas in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
Democrats and conservation groups warn that opening these landscapes to commercial development will result in permanent damage to irreplaceable geological and cultural treasures.
Author James Rodriguez: "Tribal nations were promised a seat at the table on public lands decisions, but this move shows how quickly that promise can be broken when energy interests line up behind the president."
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