Updated July 13, 2026 07:41PM
President Donald Trump shrunk the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in an executive order signed on Monday afternoon in a ceremony attended by Utah legislators, cutting the protected areas by a combined 3 million acres.
The order reduced the size of Bears Ears to a total of 121,096 acres, split across two units, and Grand Staircase-Escalante to a size of 181,541 acres, also split into two parts. Those cuts are even steeper than the reductions the White House announced in 2017, slashing Bears Ears’ size by 91 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante’s by 90 percent. In a news release announcing the changes, the White House said that, “while scenic, these generic features are not ‘landmarks,’ ‘structures,’ or ‘objects of historical or scientific interest’ worthy of protection under the Antiquities Act,” referring to the sandstone canyons and desert mesas for which Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are famed.
“They took the land away from the people, which is really quite ridiculous,” Trump said of the monuments in announcing the changes.
The order also drastically changes the composition of the committee that helps steer policy on Bears Ears. Obama’s original order established the Bears Ears Commission, an independent body consisting of one representative each from the five tribes that lobbied for the monument’s creation. Trump’s new order makes that bloc a minority in a fifteen member commission, adding four representatives from local towns and the surrounding county, and six members chosen by Utah’s governor from interest groups including livestock grazers, private landowners, and “outdoor recreation participants, including commercial recreation providers or off-highway vehicle users.”
The executive action drew praise from monument opponents like Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who said at the signing, “We believe that under the Antiquities Act, these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities. And these million-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware do not fit that designation.”
In a statement, Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, decried the reduction and said that the lack of prior notice or publicity around it proved that the administration knew it was “on the wrong side of history.”
“When Trump tried to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase in 2017, he flew to Salt Lake City and announced it from the state capitol in front of Utah politicians,” Weiss said. “This time, the president wants as few cameras in the room as possible. The five Tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and the American people will learn what happened to their land from a press release.”
In an email to Backpacker, Caty Payette, communications director for New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, the ranking Democrat on the energy and natural resources committee, confirmed that the senator received no advance notice of the reductions. In an emailed statement, Heinrich called the reductions “another chapter in this administration’s War on the West.”
“These monuments safeguard irreplaceable archaeological sites, critical wildlife habitat, and landscapes that hold deep cultural and spiritual significance for Tribal communities,” Heinrich said. “They also support local economies built around outdoor recreation.”
On a phone call with Backpacker on Friday before the official announcement, Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), described Trump’s executive order as a deeply unpopular attack on America’s public lands system.
“Grand Staircase-Escalante, the first national monument entrusted to the Bureau of Land Management, is really the backbone of the national conservation lands landscape system, and both Grand Staircase and Bears Ears are the crown jewels of the nation’s system of federal public land,” Bloch said. “This is the heart of red rock country, a place that all Americans know and cherish. Americans overwhelmingly want to see these places protected and not exploited.”
The cuts are the latest salvo in a long-running political battle over the fate of the monuments, which protect a grand total of 3.25 million acres of Utah’s canyon country, hundreds of miles of backpacking routes, and ancient architecture, rock art, and sacred sites that are important to at least five Native tribes in the region. Since their respective foundings in 1996 and 2016, Grand Staircase and Bears Ears have been targets for Utah politicians, who have characterized the designations as federal overreach and argued that they’re locking up important mineral and gas deposits. In 2017, President Trump shrunk the monuments by executive order, cutting Bears Ears’ area by 85 percent and Grand Staircase by nearly half. (A 2018 New York Times investigation found that in a message to the Department of the Interior, a staffer for Utah’s then-Senator Orrin Hatch suggested cuts to Bears Ears that were a near-exact match for those finally announced, writing at the time that the reductions would “resolve all known mineral conflicts.”)
Both environmental groups and the tribal coalition that had pushed for Bears Ears’ establishment sued over the reductions, arguing that the Antiquities Act gave presidents the ability to establish and expand monuments but not shrink them. Before courts could rule, however, President Joe Biden restored and slightly expanded the monuments, rendering the lawsuits moot.
Many of those plaintiffs now say they intend to resume their suits against the administration. In an email, Perry Wheeler, a spokesperson for Earthjustice, told Backpacker that the organization will file its lawsuit in the coming weeks; Bloch said that SUWA also plans to take legal action.
Opponents have filed their own legislative and legal challenges. An effort by Utah Representatives Celeste Maloy and Mike Lee to rescind the Biden-era management plan for Grand Staircase using the Congressional Review Act failed when it missed a key deadline. A lawsuit by Utah arguing that Biden drew overly-broad boundaries for the monuments has fared somewhat better, with an appeals court ruling in June that the president’s decision could be subject to legal review.
The White House’s latest executive order fulfills a warning by some observers that national monuments and the areas they protect could grow and shrink at the whims of successive presidential administrations. In an interview with Backpacker after the Trump administration first shrunk the monuments in 2017, Robert Keiter, a law professor at the University of Utah, said that if the courts ultimately ruled that presidents had the authority to shrink monuments’ boundaries, it could result in a “yo-yo effect” that “could go on endlessly.”
The announcement comes as crews continue to battle the Babylon Fire, which started in Bears Ears and has since spread to cover a large swathe of the monument, causing closures there and at nearby Canyonlands National Park. At 106,610 acres and 50 percent containment as of the time of publication, the Babylon Fire is currently the largest wildfire burning in the United States. The long-term damage that the monument has sustained is so far unclear.