Trump Rescues Nearly 3 Million Acres Of Utah Wilderness From Ongoing Threat Of Being Protected

WASHINGTON. In a decisive act of stewardship, President Trump on Monday signed proclamations shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90 percent, liberating nearly 3 million acres of southern Utah from the burden of federal protection so that the land might finally be put to use.

The order reduces Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.87 million acres to 182,000, and Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 121,000, a change the White House characterized in a fact sheet titled "Restoring Sensible Land Management." Administration officials stressed that the acreage was not being taken from the public so much as released to it, freed at last to host grazing allotments, off-road routes, and the coal and uranium deposits that had spent decades languishing beneath scenery.

"For too long these lands have been locked away, doing nothing but existing," said one senior administration official, describing the monuments as a case of federal overreach so severe that the rocks themselves had been prevented from participating in the economy. The official noted that the reduction, the largest rollback of public land protections in American history, was best understood as a routine correction.

The action marks the second time the President has shrunk the two monuments, the first having come in 2017 before President Biden restored them in 2021, an intervention the administration described as having re-trapped the land in preservation. Officials expressed confidence that the acreage, having now been rescued a second time, would be spared any further episodes of protection for as long as possible.

Trump signed the proclamations in the Oval Office surrounded by Utah's six-member congressional delegation and the governor, who had long sought local control of the terrain for recreation, grazing, and mineral development. Tribal leaders, whose ancestral connections to Bears Ears formed the original basis for its protection and who by law were to be consulted, called the decision heartbreaking and said they had learned of its scope alongside everyone else.

At press time, the President was reviewing the Antiquities Act itself to determine whether the century-old law authorizing the creation of national monuments could be repurposed to authorize their disappearance.