President Trump signed two executive orders Monday slashing nearly 3 million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, reversing Biden-era expansions and reigniting a decades-long battle over presidential authority under the Antiquities Act.
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“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,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re terminating certain monuments. They call it monuments, not the ones we have outside, but these are large, thousands of acres.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, and the entire Utah congressional delegation were present at the signing and said they believe that the monument designations being terminated by Mr. Trump’s executive order are necessary given their massive size.
“We believe that under the Antiquities Act, it’s very clear that these monument designations are supposed to be the smallest area possible to protect the antiquities,” Mr. Cox said.
“These multi-million-acre monuments, larger than the state of Delaware, certainly do not fit that designation.”
He added, “Now, 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.”
Mr. Cox noted that Utah has seven of them, ranging from around 700 to 7,000 acres, cases for which he said the monuments’ designation under the Antiquities Act was intended.
It was not intended to be “millions of acres as what happened with Grand Staircase, Escalante and Bears Ears. And so we’re grateful that the President has made a determination that we need to right-size these monuments again,” he said.
The Antiquities Act of 1906, a short law originally passed to stop looting and vandalism of archaeological sites in the American Southwest, makes it a crime to damage or remove antiquities from federal land without permission.
The law also gives the president the power to unilaterally declare “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” on federal land as national monuments — without needing Congress to pass a law.
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The Utah governor noted that the order does not remove other protections already in place in those areas; rather, it makes the monuments more manageable, allowing the state to continue protecting these antiquities.
The fight has ping-ponged through multiple administrations and left Utah officials fuming over what they call federal overreach on their own land.
Grand Staircase-Escalante GSENM is a 1.9-million-acre Utah monument created in 1996 by President Clinton using the Antiquities Act. Its size was slashed by Mr. Trump in 2017 and restored by President Biden in 2021.
Bears Ears, meanwhile, is a 1.35-million-acre monument designated in 2016 by President Obama and reduced in 2017 by Mr. Trump.
Utah’s congressional delegation has argued for nearly three decades that the monuments are oversized and therefore restrict grazing, recreation, and potential resource development without justification.
The lawmakers also say they were imposed on local communities without adequate input.
Tribal nations, however, see Bears Ears as a sacred cultural landscape essential to their heritage, not just federal land.
Utah is over two-thirds owned by the federal government and counties where the monuments sit are over 90% federal land, leaving local governments controlling only 5% to 10%.
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