President Donald Trump signed executive orders on Monday, July 13, reducing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90% each, thereby reducing their combined protected land from 3.2 million acres to approximately 300,000 acres.
The move, signed at the White House alongside Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and members of the state’s congressional delegation, reverses protections that stretch back decades and marks the second time Trump has targeted the same two monuments since taking office.
Tribal leaders and conservation groups condemned the decision within hours, while Utah Republicans praised it as a long-sought win for local control over federal land. Trump used his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to issue the proclamations, framing the reductions as a correction to what he called years of overreach.
“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” Trump noted from the Oval Office. “It was very unfair to the people of Utah and now fairness has been brought back.”
Cox echoed the sentiment, telling reporters, “This is a big day for Utah,” arguing that monument boundaries should stick to the smallest area necessary to protect historical sites.
The scale of Monday’s cuts outpaces anything from Trump’s first term. In December 2017, he reduced Bears Ears from 1.3 million acres to about 228,000 acres, an 85% cut and trimmed Grand Staircase-Escalante roughly in half, from 1.9 million acres to about 1 million.
Former President Joe Biden restored both monuments to their original boundaries after taking office. This time, the orders leave the two monuments at less than a quarter of what remained after the first round of reductions. The orders are expected to take effect in 60 days.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee told the Deseret News he began working toward Monday’s outcome more than a year ago, holding meetings with local stakeholders and elected officials.
Rep. Celeste Maloy added that they have been “working on every tool” to make sure that the “people in rural Utah know that we hear them when they say that they are tired of having decisions about our resources in Utah being made 2,500 miles away by people who don’t know and love the resources the way we do.”
“A lot of the big feelings people have about it are based on misunderstandings of how federal land management works,” she added.
Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, called the decision “heartbreaking” and said federal officials had dodged their legal duty to consult tribal nations before acting.
“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.”
Bears Ears was designated in 2016 at the request of five tribes, the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Uintah-Ouray Ute and had been jointly managed through an agreement between those nations and federal agencies.
During the signing, Trump claimed the monuments’ existing boundaries had made it nearly impossible to hunt, fish or even walk on the land. “You can’t do anything,” he said. “You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.”
Deputy Interior Secretary Kate MacGregor responded, “That’s exactly right, sir. So you are remedying that today.”