Trump cuts the two national monuments by 90%.
On Monday, July 13, President Trump signed a pair of executive orders cutting nearly 3 million acres out of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in southern Utah. That is roughly 90 percent of the land each monument had protected. It’s the second time Trump has attacked these monuments. The first attempt, in 2017, cut Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half. President Biden restored both in 2021. This time, the cuts go much further than before, leaving the two monuments at a fraction of what they were even after the 2017 reductions.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments were both established under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The Antiquities Act authorizes the president to proclaim national monuments on federal lands to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.” Once designated, those lands receive federal monument protection and management under the terms of the proclamation and applicable federal land-management laws. The Act explicitly gives presidents the power to create national monuments, but it is silent on whether they can later shrink or abolish them.
By making this proclamation, President Trump is shining a spotlight on a complex legal landscape. Utah sued the federal government in 2022 after Biden restored the monuments, arguing he’d exceeded his authority under the Antiquities Act. That case was dismissed, then revived by a federal appeals court just last month. Now that Trump’s new orders have effectively delivered the outcome Utah’s lawsuit sought, legal observers expect the state’s case may be rendered moot, while reviving the older lawsuits filed by tribes and conservation groups against Trump’s original 2017 reductions.
The orders also dismantle the co-management structures that tribes spent years working to build. Bears Ears’ inter-tribal working group, the first arrangement of its kind giving tribes a formal role in managing a national monument, has been disbanded, and tribal officials say they were never consulted about the decision.
“Our Tribes were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that’s unacceptable… Today’s action is a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with Tribes,” said Autumn Gillard, coordinator of the Grand Staircase Inter-Tribal Coalition and representative for the Southern Paiute.
Legal scholars have pointed out that if courts eventually decide a president can unilaterally shrink a predecessor’s monument, the boundaries of places like Bears Ears could keep swinging back and forth indefinitely, monument by monument, administration by administration, never settling into the kind of long-term protection the Antiquities Act was designed to provide.
Photo: South and North Six Shooter, which are no longer considered within Bears Ears National Monument following President Trump’s July 2026 Proclamation.
