President Trump on Monday stripped nearly 3 million acres of environmental protection from two southern Utah national monuments, a move that far exceeds the reductions he imposed during his first term and restores the possibility of drilling, mining, and other resource extraction across vast swaths of public land.
Grand Staircase-Escalante will lose roughly 1.7 of its 1.87 million acres. Bears Ears, established by Obama in 2016 as a monument managed jointly with nearby Indigenous tribes, will shrink from 1.36 million acres to just 121,000. Combined, the orders affect more than 90% of each monument's original area.
The scale of the reduction marks a dramatic escalation. In 2017, Trump eliminated nearly half of Grand Staircase-Escalante and 85% of Bears Ears, actions that were then regarded as the largest rollback of federal land protections in U.S. history. The Biden administration restored both monuments to their earlier boundaries in 2021 and added 12,000 acres to Bears Ears. Trump's new orders now erase that restoration and go further.
The cuts align with Trump's stated goal to open public lands for expanded drilling and mining operations. Yet the economic case for extraction remains uneven. Utah state officials have acknowledged "very little energy potential" at Bears Ears despite drilling leases that were nominated before Biden's restoration. A uranium mine was reportedly reopened within Bears Ears after Trump's 2017 cuts, and uranium mining presents a more realistic commercial prospect than oil and gas drilling. Grand Staircase-Escalante contains a large coal deposit, but when Trump opened the land during his first term, mining companies concluded it was not profitable enough to pursue.
Not all land removed from monument protection will be open to unrestricted development. Portions remain within federal Wilderness Study Areas and Areas of Environmental Concern, designations that restrict certain activities. However, Trump's Interior Department announced last month that it will review policies governing these study areas, raising concerns among conservation groups that existing protections could be weakened.
The legal landscape is deeply uncertain. National monuments are created by presidential proclamation under the Antiquities Act to protect places of historic, prehistoric, or scientific interest, unlike national parks which require congressional action. A 2017 lawsuit challenging Trump's authority to rescind a monument's protections remains unresolved, and the latest cuts will likely revive those claims. A separate case filed by Utah officials in 2022 seeking to reverse Biden's restoration of the monuments was dismissed by a federal judge in 2023 but revived on appeal last month. The outcome of that appeal is now unclear, given that Trump has effectively enacted the very result the lawsuit sought.
Utah Republicans, who have long opposed the monuments' original boundaries and sought to allow expanded drilling, mining, and grazing, have been the primary driving force behind these reductions. The monuments themselves contain ancient ruins, fossils, rock art, and recreational areas that have drawn support from conservation groups and outdoor enthusiasts nationwide.
Author James Rodriguez: "This is Trump moving faster and more aggressively on public lands than he did the first time around, and the legal challenges aren't settled enough to stop him now."
Comments