For the second time in the past decade, two Utah national monuments have had their protections dramatically reduced by the Trump administration.
Flanked by Utah’s full delegation, the governor and the state’s Speaker of the House, President Donald Trump signed two proclamations to shrink Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by around 90%, and Bears Ears National Monument by 91%.
The president framed it as a win for local control.
“We've done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “It was very unfair to the people of Utah, and now fairness has been brought back. It's going to be better taken care of, and they'll be able to use it a little bit.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called the change “right-sizing,” saying the intention of monuments is to manage the smallest area possible to protect antiquities.
“This does not remove the other protections that already exist in those areas, just making the monuments more manageable so that we have the resources necessary to continue to protect these antiquities,” Cox said.
The orders aren’t a surprise. Trump reduced the monuments’ boundaries during his first term in 2017. At that time, he halved Grand Staircase’s size and cut Bears Ears’ by 83%. Both monuments were then restored in 2021 by former President Joe Biden.
Conservation groups immediately condemned Trump’s latest move as unlawful and have vowed to take legal action against it.
The change could have real impacts on everything from native plants and wildlife to dark skies, said Jackie Grant, who directs Grand Staircase Escalante Partners. She’s especially concerned about the monument’s wilderness study areas, which are undeveloped.
“It seems like this is laying the groundwork to further degrade and develop the national monument by opening up other areas that we thought were protected to development and extraction,” Grant said.
The changes are part of Trump’s broader push to increase oil and gas production on American public lands after declaring a “national energy emergency” in early 2025. Combined with Trump’s order to rapidly accelerate the permitting process for energy development on federal land, new mining projects could potentially now be fast-tracked.
The Bear Ears proclamation specifically calls out the minerals in the area the administration says are critical to national security, such as copper and uranium.
The order also walks back years of cooperation between the federal government and local Indigenous leaders to manage the monuments.
Bears Ears’ management plan from early 2025 was the culmination of a first-of-its-kind collaboration between federal agencies and the five tribes of the Bears Ears Commission — Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Tribe, Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation. The goal was to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into balancing public use and protection of cultural and natural resources. The Biden-era management plan for Grand Staircase also had input from Native tribes.
The southern Utah landscapes have been home to Native peoples since time immemorial, said Autumn Gillard, a Southern Paiute woman and coordinator with the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition. And reducing the monument’s protections could expose the lands to potential destruction.
“These are very sacred cultural landscapes, and they are very near and dear to tribes,” Gillard said. “We are very disappointed to see that our perspective was not included in these decisions that were made.”
Her coalition said Grand Staircase contains thousands of significant cultural places, including sacred sites, ancestral dwellings and petroglyphs. According to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, that monument’s landscape has more than 100,000 archeological sites that represent the homelands of several tribes.
Before Trump’s action, Grand Staircase covered nearly 1.9 million acres in south-central Utah. Former President Bill Clinton designated it in 1996 using the power of the Antiquities Act. Former President Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016. The southeast Utah monument previously protected 1.36 million acres.
The Antiquities Act allows presidents to move quickly to preserve historic, scientific and cultural sites through executive action, and presidents have used it to protect land hundreds of times since 1906. Gov. Cox and other Republican state leaders have continued to argue that expansive monuments go beyond what the act intended.
Utah political leaders have long fought against the designations, saying they further federal government overreach in the state.
Sen. Mike Lee led an effort in early 2026 to use the Congressional Review Act to change Grand Staircase’s rules, potentially opening more of its land to vehicles and energy development. The effort ultimately failed, but it drew support from the delegation, Cox and the commissioners of Garfield and Kane counties.
Following Trump’s signing, Rep. Celeste Maloy said the president’s actions are in response to the people of Utah.
“We know you value this land,” she said. “You want it used for multiple-use and not locked up, and so this is a very different process than how the monuments were created.”
Still, some surveys suggest that most Utahns favor protecting the monuments.
A public opinion poll commissioned by the conservation group Grand Canyon Trust in 2024 indicated that nearly two-thirds of Utah voters support maintaining the current size and number of the state’s national monuments. Colorado College’s 2025 Conservation in the West poll also showed that 82% of Utahns supported leaving national monument designations in place.
In a state with a big outdoor tourism industry, the monuments also have economic impacts. A recent analysis from independent research group Headwaters Economics showed that Grand Staircase, Bears Ears and other national monuments boost local economies as visitation increases.
