Trump slashes Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by over 90%, opening nearly 3 million acres to mining and drilling

What was signed

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders at the White House on Monday, 13 July 2026, reducing Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by more than 90% each. The proclamations cut Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 121,100 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.87 million acres to 181,500 acres. Together, the orders strip protections from roughly 2.9 million acres of federal land in southern Utah, opening it to grazing, motorized recreation, logging, fossil fuel extraction, and mining for critical minerals. Utah Governor Spencer Cox and the state’s two U.S. senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis, stood with Trump at the signing.

We're doing something very dramatic and very important for the people of Utah, and the people of our country, because many people use it.

Second time for both monuments

Monday’s action revisits a playbook from Trump’s first term. In December 2017 he reduced Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by roughly 45%, which at the time was the largest rollback of federal land protections in U.S. history. Tribes and environmental groups sued, but before a court reached a final ruling, President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries in 2021 and added about 12,000 acres to Bears Ears. The new cuts go deeper than the 2017 reductions: Grand Staircase-Escalante loses 91% of its area and Bears Ears loses 90%.

The legal question

The orders test whether a president can shrink a national monument created by a predecessor under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The law gives presidents the power to designate monuments protecting sites of cultural, historic, or scientific interest, but it is silent on reduction or abolition. Environmental law firm Earthjustice said it would take legal action to maintain protections.

President Trump's attack on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments is just as illegal today as it was in 2017. The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to create monuments, not to abolish or shrink them.

Thomas Delehanty, an Earthjustice attorney, told AFP that only Congress holds the power to reduce or eliminate national monuments. Utah Republicans counter that prior administrations abused the act by locking up areas far larger than necessary. Governor Cox noted the monuments are bigger than the state of Delaware and said the designations fail the law’s requirement to protect “the smallest area possible.”

What is on the land

The monuments contain ancient cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, sandstone canyons, mesas, and more than 100,000 archaeological sites, including rock art dated to at least 5,000 years ago, according to Le Parisien and The New York Times. They also hold coal and uranium reserves. Grand Staircase-Escalante, established by Bill Clinton in 1996, sits atop a large coal deposit. Bears Ears, created by Barack Obama in 2016 to be managed with Indigenous tribes near the Four Corners, has uranium. Axios reports that Utah officials have acknowledged “very little energy potential” at Bears Ears, but conservation groups say one uranium mine was reopened inside the monument after Trump’s first-term reductions. Coal mining at Grand Staircase-Escalante was not considered profitable enough for companies to pursue after the 2017 cuts.

Wider deregulation push

The monument reductions fit a broader pattern of opening public lands to industry. In May 2026, Trump moved to lift restrictions on off-road vehicles in most national parks. Last month the Interior Department announced a review of policies around Wilderness Study Areas, which conservation groups say could weaken the protections those designations offer. Some lands removed from the monuments remain within federal Wilderness Study Areas or Areas of Environmental Concern, shielding them from immediate development, but those shields are under review.

You can't go fishing; you can't do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.

What comes next

Tribes and environmental groups are expected to file a new lawsuit challenging the 2026 reductions. The outcome could set a precedent affecting dozens of other national monuments and millions of additional acres. The practical timeline for any extraction remains uncertain: parcels were nominated for drilling leases before Biden restored the original Bears Ears boundaries, yet no large-scale mining moved forward after Trump’s first-term rollback.