President Donald Trump is shrinking the size of two national monuments in Utah, mirroring action he initially took during his first term, in 2017.
National monuments are created at the president’s discretion under the 1906 Antiquities Act, and protect cultural sites and resources from looting and destruction. The designation is also used to protect landscapes from extractive activities like mining and oil and gas production.
Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument was initially designated by Bill Clinton in 1996. Trump’s first reduction shrunk the southern Utah monument by 47%. Barack Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, with the explicit goal of tribal stewardship of the landscape. This led to the creation of the Bears Ears Commission. The 2017 Trump executive order reduced Bears Ears by 85%.
The proclamations issued by Trump on Monday, July 13 go even further. Bears Ears will shrink to just under 9% of its prior size, and Grand Staircase-Escalante to just under 10%. Both monuments will be under 200,000 acres—a stark departure from about 1.3 million acres for Bears Ears and close to 2 million acres for Grand Staircase-Escalante.
This move “will also account for practical limitations on the BLM’s and the USFS’s land management resources and funding,” the proclamation reads.
“For too long, presidents have weaponized monument designations to lock up millions of acres, close roads, restrict grazing, and cut rural communities off from lands their families have lived on and worked for generations,” wrote Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in a statement. “I thank the President for correcting this abuse and keeping his promise to the people of Utah.”
In a press conference Monday afternoon, Trump signed the proclamations, surrounded by Utah’s congressional delegation and other state officials. They thanked the president for “listening to the people of Utah” and “rightsiz(ing)” the monuments.
“You can't do anything,” the president said. “You can't go hunting. You can't go fishing. You can't do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.”
Utah’s hunting regulations clarify that hunting is allowed on both monuments. In fact, all national parks and monuments in Utah are closed to hunting, except for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Scott Braden, the executive director of advocacy nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said this kind of policy opens up the area—and indeed other monuments—to activities that could degrade the landscape, like mining.
“Undoing the boundaries of the monuments and reducing them in size, it's really about elevating energy production, motorized recreation, and sort of disturbing activities that could degrade those resources in kind of an unfettered way across these landscapes,” he said.
He said it’s irresponsible to leave these vulnerable landscapes without the elevated protections monument status provides, especially because southern Utah is already feeling the impacts of climate change.
“To do that while the largest wildfire in the nation, the Babylon Fire, rages out of control in the heart of Bears Ears, I think is just despicable, frankly,” he said.
Officials say the Babylon Fire is about 50% contained as of Monday morning, and it’s burned over 106,000 acres.
Braden also noted that despite claims to the contrary, the resource management plans for both monuments went through years of public feedback and consultation, and many of the rural towns and counties in southern Utah were contributing agencies to the plans. Keeping monument designations in place is popular across the West, including in Utah: polls show 86% of Utahns support keeping monument designations in place.
Tribal consultation was also an important part of developing the resource management plans, and those same tribes will be impacted by this latest action.
“Our Tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that’s unacceptable. The federal government must honor its Trust and Treaty obligations to our Tribes—it is not optional,” wrote Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition Coordinator Autumn Gillard in a statement. “Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with Tribes. It also profoundly disrespects our intergenerational Traditional Knowledge by destroying a framework for Tribal co-stewardship over our ancestral lands in which we invested years of effort. Today’s action cannot stand.”
“Every time the Monument is cut apart and put back together, proper land management gets delayed, public resources are wasted, and Tribes are asked to start over after years of consultation,” wrote Erik Stanfield, an anthropologist with the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department. “We need stewardship and consistency, not reactionary politics.”
Nearly every president since Teddy Roosevelt has used the Antiquities Act to designate national monuments. Many national parks were monuments before they were parks, such as the Grand Canyon, Arches, and Grand Teton.
Trump is the first president to use the Antiquities Act to try to diminish monuments, overturning close to 90 years of legal precedent. A document issued by the Department of Justice last year says that the president does have the power to diminish or revoke monument status—though that’s not legally binding, but rather the opinion of the DOJ.
SUWA, the five tribal nations that make up the Bears Ears Commission, and other environmental groups sued the first Trump administration in 2017 over the initial monument reductions. Several of those groups, including SUWA and EarthJustice, have indicated that they’re prepared to go to court again.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
