President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday that strips federal monument protections from roughly 2.7 million acres of Utah wilderness, reducing the combined footprint of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments from more than 3.2 million acres to less than 303,000, a cut of approximately 90 percent.
The move reopens vast tracts of public land to potential mining, drilling, and grazing that had been locked away under designations imposed by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It also marks the largest rollback of national monument protections in American history, Fox News reported.
For Utah's elected leaders, the order corrects decades of federal overreach. For tribal groups and environmental organizations, it opens a fight they say will end in court. Either way, the executive action forces a long-overdue reckoning with a question Washington has dodged for years: who actually controls the American West?
Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996, locking up roughly 1.7 million acres that contained large deposits of coal and uranium. Obama followed in 2016 by creating Bears Ears, about 1.35 million acres of red-rock canyon country dotted with ancient cliffside villages and petroglyphs, making it the first national monument established at the request of tribal nations, AP News reported.
Together, the two monuments sprawled across more land than all five of Utah's national parks combined. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who attended the signing ceremony, framed the original designations as a clear abuse of the Antiquities Act, the 1906 law that gives presidents authority to protect objects of historic or scientific interest on federal land.
Cox told reporters at the ceremony:
"We believe that under the Antiquities Act, it's very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities, and these multimillion-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation."
That argument tracks the plain text of the statute. The Antiquities Act expressly requires that designations be limited to the smallest area consistent with protecting the objects in question. Clinton and Obama treated the law as a landscape-conservation tool, blanketing millions of acres rather than drawing tight boundaries around specific sites. Utah Rep. Rob Bishop wrote in National Review that "the public at large reaps all the supposed benefits of the monuments without having to live with their deadening economic impact."
Trump cast the order in populist terms. At the signing ceremony, he said simply:
"They took the land from the people quite honestly. We're giving it back."
The practical effect is significant. Monument protections prevent drilling, mining, and construction on the surrounding landscape. Removing those protections from roughly 2.9 million acres means land that sits atop coal and uranium deposits, resources Utah officials have long wanted developed, can now be leased for energy exploration, the New York Post reported. The order also opens acreage for recreational activities and traditional ranching uses that monument status had curtailed.
The action fits a broader pattern. Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have pushed to expand U.S. energy production on federal land, including clearing the way for mining and oil drilling in Alaska. The monument reductions extend that strategy to the interior West, where vast mineral wealth has sat untouched beneath layers of executive-branch protection.
For communities in rural southern Utah, the stakes are not abstract. Monument designations restricted grazing, blocked road maintenance, and chilled economic activity in counties that depend on resource extraction and tourism, not one or the other, but both. Bishop noted that the county commission, state legislature, local Navajo Nation chapter, governor, and the state's entire congressional delegation all opposed the Bears Ears designation when Obama imposed it in his final weeks in office.
Not everyone in the region welcomed the rollback. Native American groups, including the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, criticized the order as a threat to sacred cultural sites. Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the coalition, said:
"From a Navajo perspective, Bears Ears is not simply a piece of federal public land. This is a living cultural site that holds our histories, our ceremonies, our traditional foods and medicines and our ancestors' footprints."
The Navajo Nation has previously vowed to litigate reductions to Bears Ears, citing a lack of tribal consultation. Environmental groups and several Democratic attorneys general have also signaled legal action, the Washington Examiner reported. The Antiquities Act does not explicitly grant presidents authority to reduce the size of national monuments, and the question has never been fully tested in court.
Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico called the executive action "another chapter in this administration's war on the West." Sen. Maria Cantwell said Trump's administration "deserves an F for stewardship."
That rhetoric, however, skips past an inconvenient fact: the communities closest to these monuments, the ones who live on the land, work the land, and pay property taxes on the land, largely supported the reductions. The opposition is loudest in Washington and coastal capitals, not in the small Utah towns where monument designations determined whether a road could be graded or a well could be drilled.
The legal fight ahead is real. No president has ever cut a national monument back to the extent Trump's order envisions. Reuters reported that Native American groups and environmentalists are prepared to sue the federal government over the decision.
The core legal question is whether a president's power under the Antiquities Act runs in only one direction, creation, or whether it also includes the authority to shrink or eliminate designations made by predecessors. Supporters of the reductions argue that the power to designate logically includes the power to modify. Critics counter that Congress alone can undo monument protections.
Courts will sort it out. But the underlying policy dispute is not really about legal technicalities. It is about whether a president sitting in Washington can lock up millions of acres with the stroke of a pen, override the wishes of every elected official in the affected state, and call it conservation.
Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante without setting foot in Utah for the ceremony, he signed the proclamation in Arizona. Obama created Bears Ears in the final days of his presidency, after Utah's entire congressional delegation asked him not to. In both cases, the Antiquities Act was used not to protect a specific archaeological site or a particular set of ruins, but to impose sweeping land-use restrictions across an area larger than some states.
Trump's order does not abolish either monument. It shrinks them, dramatically, to something closer to what the Antiquities Act's authors envisioned: targeted protections for specific objects of historic or scientific value, not million-acre land grabs that freeze out the people who actually live there.
Whether the courts uphold that distinction will shape federal land policy for a generation. The remaining 300,000 protected acres still cover the most significant archaeological and cultural sites. What changes is that the vast buffer zones, the millions of acres of desert, canyon, and mesa that Clinton and Obama swept in for good measure, return to multiple-use management.
The tribes' concerns about sacred sites deserve serious attention, and the 300,000 acres that remain protected should reflect that. But the answer to preserving petroglyphs and ancestral villages was never to wall off an area the size of Connecticut and tell ranchers, miners, and county road crews to find somewhere else to go.
When the people who live on the land and the officials they elect all say a federal designation went too far, Washington should listen. For once, it did.
