President Donald Trump signed orders Monday reducing the size of two huge national monuments in Utah, a move likely to reignite a fight with conservationists and public land advocates.
“Fairness has been brought back,” Trump said at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, flanked by Utah’s congressional delegation and Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican.
The move echoes cuts that Trump made to the monuments during his first term in office, which were later reversed by former President Joe Biden. But the orders signed Monday shear even more land from the protected monuments in the Utah desert.
In 2017, Trump reduced the size of the Bears Ears National Monument from about 1.35 million acres to 228,000 acres. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was downsized from 1.87 million acres to roughly 1 million acres.
Under the order Monday, Trump shrunk Bears Ears to roughly 121,000 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante to about 182,000 acres.
Trump’s proclamations said there were several “flaws” in the designations made by previous presidents, all Democrats, that justified the boundary changes. This included the “relative commonness” of some of the cultural resources the monuments were designed to protect, such as prehistoric campsites, petroglyphs and pictographs.
Cox said Monday that the monuments were too large and their designation oversteps the original intent of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to provide enhanced protections to federal land.
But Democrats and environmental groups slammed the move Monday. The monuments have also been important to nearby tribes, particularly the Bears Ears site, which was partially managed by a tribal commission. That group was disbanded by Trump’s order, which says tribes should be consulted as required by federal law.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, condemned what he called a “war on the West.”
“Time and again, this administration has put the interests of billionaires and powerful industries ahead of America’s public lands and the people who own them,” Heinrich said in a statement.
Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for Save Our Parks, said Congress must step in and stop the “illegal effort” to reduce the monuments.
“Bears Ears and Grand Staircase belong to Utahns and all Americans, not to wannabe kings and their minions,” he said in a statement.
The Trump administration last year began a review of at least six national monuments, with the focus of potentially paving the way for new mineral extraction on some of the lands.
In addition to the Utah monuments, those considered included the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon and the Ironwood Forest monuments in Arizona, the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks monument in New Mexico and the Chuckwalla monument in California.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed a secretarial order on his first day in office last year directing his agencies to “review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands consistent with existing law” as part of a push to “unleash” U.S. energy production.
Former President Bill Clinton first created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996 and former President Barack Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument in 2016.
Trump’s original move in his first term to shrink the Utah monuments spurred multiple federal lawsuits. Environmentalists argued that only Congress had the power to chip away at national monuments after they are designated by a president.
But Trump’s Justice Department last year published an opinion that concluded presidents could alter the designations of their predecessors.
If Trump’s latest moves turn into new legal battles — as seems likely — the administration’s position could find a receptive audience in Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who in a four-page statement released as part of a decision in 2021 said the Antiquities Act deserved a fresh look. Roberts focused on part of the law that says monument designations should be “limited to the smallest area compatible with the care and management of the objects to be protected” — suggesting some presidents aren’t following that guidance.
Federal courts have previously given presidents wide discretion to set the size of monuments, a stance that goes back to 1920 and a failed effort to challenge what was then the Grand Canyon National Monument, which was designated by former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.
Scott Braden, executive director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said Monday the group would challenge the changes in court.
“These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation,” he said in a statement. “We are confident that President Trump’s reckless and unlawful acts will be rejected and the Monuments restored.”
In general, the public often expresses support for presidents designating national monuments, often a legacy move executed by presidents in their final years in office.
Roughly three-quarters of people polled by the National Parks Conservation Association last year either strongly or somewhat supported maintaining land protections designated by a sitting president.
But Utah Republicans have long tried to take an ax to the federal designations, which they argue lock up land that could be used for mining or other uses. More than 60 percent of Utah is managed by the federal government.
Utah Sen. John Curtis (R) said from the Oval Office that the state’s lands are better managed locally than by federal agencies.
“Utahns will tell you they love these lands,” he said. “If this is about good management, it really should be done in Utah by people who have demonstrated over decades and decades and decades and generations that they’re good managers of this land.”
Redge Johnson, director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, said in an interview Monday that Utah’s primary concern is that the monuments were too large but lacked the resources — like sufficient law enforcement officers — to cover such spans of land.
He acknowledged that there is also mining interest, particularly in Grand Staircase-Escalante where there are reserves of coal, cobalt and copper. Cox has made increased mining a key priority of his administration, but Johnson said extraction access wasn’t Utah’s primary complaint.
He said there is a “misconception” that removing monument designation eliminates federal protections. These lands will still be subject to the National Historic Preservation Act and other laws, he said.
Trump’s proclamations also note that large chunks of the monuments are also managed by the Bureau of Land Management as wilderness or wilderness study areas.
Scott Waldman contributed to this report.
