Trump Shrinks Bears Ears And Grand Staircase-Escalante By 90 Percent, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Land Biden Restored Had Been Permitted To Stay Protected

WASHINGTON. President Trump signed a pair of executive orders Monday afternoon reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by roughly 3 million acres, or about 90 percent of their combined size, in what conservation groups described as the largest rollback of public land protection in American history, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that the acreage President Biden restored in 2021 had been allowed to remain protected in the years since.

Under the orders, Grand Staircase-Escalante shrinks from 1.87 million acres to 182,000, and Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 121,000. Officials noted that the reductions comfortably exceed the cuts Trump ordered during his first term, when he eliminated 85 percent of Bears Ears and roughly half of Grand Staircase, a scale the administration now characterizes as insufficiently ambitious. The land removed from federal protection returns to a status in which its highest use is once again available for negotiation.

The acreage carved out of the two monuments includes ground long sought for uranium extraction near Bears Ears and the Kaiparowits Plateau, home to one of the largest untapped coal deposits in the country, which had been sitting beneath the monument in a condition federal geologists describe as unmined. A source within the administration said the previous boundaries had improperly reserved the land for scenery, wildlife, and the roughly 100,000 archaeological sites the monument was created to safeguard, none of which, the source noted, generate a lease payment.

Bears Ears had been established at the request of a coalition of five tribes, the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe, and Zuni, and had been co-managed with them, an arrangement the administration confirmed will no longer apply to the 1.24 million acres now returned to unprotected status. Tribal leaders who spent years assembling the proposal were informed that the land containing their ancestral burial sites and ceremonial grounds had been freed.

"They took a tremendous amount of your land and locked it up, and now you can use it," the President told a small audience in the Oval Office, describing cliffs, canyons, and dwellings occupied for more than 12,000 years as an asset that had been withheld from the people of Utah by the people of Utah's own federal government. Aides confirmed the state's Republican delegation, which had lobbied for the reductions, would receive the news warmly.

At press time, the administration announced it was reviewing the Antiquities Act itself, on the theory that a 1906 law empowering presidents to protect land had spent 120 years leaving that land protected.