Trump Halves Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument On Same Afternoon He Guts Bears Ears, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Country's Largest Untapped Coal Seam Sat Under Land The Federal Government Had Set Aside

The Filing

SALT LAKE CITY. Speaking beneath the rotunda of the Utah State Capitol on Monday, President Donald J. Trump signed a proclamation reducing Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by roughly half, completing what officials confirmed was a long-overdue effort to ensure that conservation, once enacted, did not necessarily remain in place.

The proclamation, signed on the same December afternoon as a second order shrinking nearby Bears Ears by 85 percent, removed approximately 800,000 acres from monument protection and divided what remained into three smaller, non-contiguous units. Together the two proclamations constituted the largest reversal of national-monument designations in American history, a distinction the President identified as a victory for the citizens of Utah, by which he meant the citizens of Utah who own coal.

"Some people think that the natural beauty of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They're wrong," the President told a crowd that nodded vigorously. Officials later clarified that authority over the unprotected land would now be returned to a slightly different group of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington, none of whom were paleontologists.

Interior Department sources confirmed that the acreage stripped from the monument overlapped substantially with the Kaiparowits Plateau, one of the largest untapped coal deposits in the United States, and that this fact had played no role in the boundary decisions. Press materials emphasized that the original 1996 designation had been imposed without sufficient consultation with the state of Utah, a problem President Bill Clinton was reportedly unable to address at the time because the monument had not yet been undone.

Within hours, tribal nations, paleontologists, conservation groups, and outdoor retailers filed suit, arguing that the Antiquities Act of 1906 grants a president the authority to create monuments but not to dismantle them. Administration attorneys responded that this interpretation of the statute was excessively literal.

At press time, federal officials were preparing to publish a list of which dinosaur fossils remained protected, which did not, and which had been preemptively reassigned to the Bureau of Land Management's mineral leasing office.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who received public credit from Utah's all-Republican congressional delegation and used the signing ceremony as a centerpiece of his administration's case that public-land protections could be reversed by the same office that created them.
§Trump Organization donor network, whose extractive-industry allies aligned with the deregulatory message the action delivered.
§Coal and uranium companies with claims in and around the Kaiparowits Plateau, whose previously sidelined lease applications became newly viable on land removed from monument status.
§Utah Republican officials including Senator Orrin Hatch and Representative Rob Bishop, who had pursued reversal of the 1996 Clinton-era designation for more than two decades.
§American Petroleum Institute and allied trade groups, who gained a flagship precedent that monument boundaries can be redrawn by executive proclamation rather than congressional action.
§Foreign buyers of U.S. coal exports, who stood to benefit from any additional production unlocked by the boundary changes.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment