President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Monday shrinking the size of two national monuments in Utah, reigniting a fight that has spanned the last three decades.
The orders reduce the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, removing nearly 3 million acres of the public land designation combined, according to Trump.
Grand Staircase-Escalante will now stand at 182,000 acres, down from the previous 1.87 million acres; Bears Ears will be reduced to 121,000 acres, down from 1.36 million acres.
The latest executive action resembles the order Trump signed during his first presidential term in 2017 that significantly shrank the two monuments, a move that was later reversed by President Joe Biden in 2021.
“I’m very happy about this, and it’s better than the first time,” Trump said.
Trump signed the order in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon surrounded by all six members of Utah’s congressional delegation as well as Gov. Spencer Cox and state House Speaker Mike Schultz.
“It’s very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to to protect the antiquities and these multimillion-acre monuments that are bigger than the state of Delaware certainly do not fit that designation,” Cox said. “We definitely care about protecting these antiquities, and will continue to do so. The problem is with these giant monument designations. There are no resources that come with those.”
The fight over the two national monuments has been ongoing in Utah since they were first designated. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was created by President Bill Clinton in September 1996, and Bears Ears National Monument was created by President Barack Obama in December 2016.
National monument designations place restrictions on what recreational and economic activity residents and visitors can do on the land. The designation also prohibits anyone from pursuing new mining claims, oil and gas leasing, coal exploration or new commercial infrastructure projects.
However, the Bureau of Land Management previously found that Bears Ears and Grand Staircase have little to offer in terms of oil and gas potential, the Deseret News previously reported.
Plans for monument reductions began over a year ago
The designations have elicited mixed responses in Utah. Members of the congressional delegation, particularly Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, have sought to reduce the monuments’ acreages for more local control, recreation and grazing.
Lee told the Deseret News he began conversations to shrink the monuments shortly after Trump was reelected a year and a half ago. Those conversations led to meetings with local stakeholders and officials at the Interior Department, he said.
“There’s a lot that you’ve got to get right when you do this and we wanted to make sure that we undertook each step carefully,” Lee said in an interview.
Lee said he and Maloy would continue pushing for legislative solutions to keep the acreage reductions in place. Executive orders, while able to take effect immediately, can be easily overturned by a future presidential administration — resulting in the policy ping pong over the pair of Utah’s national monuments over the last decade.
However, passing that legislation could be easier said than done. Removing public lands designations has long been a thorny issue on Capitol Hill, and the tight margins in the House and Senate make it difficult to get proposals passed.
“The timing’s got to be right for it to happen,” Lee said. “I think that sometimes involves a lot of planning and a lot of preparation until the right moment arises.”
Earlier this year, Maloy filed a joint resolution of disapproval that proposed undoing the current resource management plan, or RMP, for Grand Staircase-Escalante that was established under the Biden administration. Instead, Maloy wanted to revert the land back to previous regulations passed in 2020, which Maloy says was “built with local communities, balanced conservation with access, and reflected the realities of life in southern Utah.”
However, the bill died after missing a key deadline in the Senate that rendered the resolution past the statute of limitations.
There are a number of other bills Lee and Maloy have drafted dealing with this issue, Lee said, but the challenge is “figuring out which one to push and when.”
Conservationist groups, former Rep. McAdams criticize order
Conservation groups are already sounding the alarms, with some preparing to fight the executive orders with legal action.
Former Rep. Ben McAdams, who is expected to be reelected in November as Utah’s only House Democrat, criticized the orders in a lengthy statement on Monday — vowing to work to reverse them once in Congress.
“Donald Trump, at the encouragement of Senator Mike Lee, is taking away protections for lands that belong to all of us and giving special interests exactly what they want,” he said in a statement. “Today’s executive order opens up some of America’s most treasured public lands so special interests can do what Congress wouldn’t let them do. Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante aren’t bargaining chips. They belong to all of us — not the mining and energy interests that have spent years trying to roll back their protections.”