Trump Cuts Two Utah National Monuments by More Than 90%

President Donald Trump is trying for the second time to dramatically shrink two national monuments in Utah.

Trump plans to cut nearly 3 million acres from Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument combined, reducing both monuments to less than 10% their original size, according to presidential proclamations signed Monday afternoon.

Trump first slashed the boundaries of these two monuments — Grand Staircase-Escalante, which was created by President Bill Clinton, and Bears Ears, designated by President Barack Obama — during his first term in December 2017. Together, they were the largest cuts to public lands in U.S. history. But the effort was embroiled in litigation for the remainder of his first term, until President Joe Biden took office and restored the monuments to their original size.

Now Trump is making even larger cuts.

The two monuments protect significant cultural, natural and scientific resources, including some of the most important dinosaur deposits in the world and areas sacred to several Native American tribes. Grand Staircase-Escalante had covered nearly 1.9 million acres, and Bears Ears spanned almost 1.4 million acres, in southern and southeastern Utah.

“It’s an incredible resource, the Grand Staircase-Escalante particularly. This change is just going to create chaos that’s not needed,” said James Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist. “We had so much to offer, and doing this is not going to help anybody.”

Utah Republicans have consistently opposed the existence of both monuments, arguing that their designation hurts the state’s ability to attract future development and that they are significantly larger than the size allowed under the Antiquities Act. In March, Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both Republicans, tried to fast-track congressional resolutions to throw out the management plans created during the Biden administration for both monuments, but time for the effort ran out before Congress could put the resolutions to a vote.

The federal government controls more than half of the land in Utah, and the state’s politicians have a long history of advocating that federal lands be transferred to the state or sold to private owners. Just last year, Lee tried and failed to mandate land sales for potentially millions of acres from the Bureau of Land Management to private landowners.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the power to unilaterally create monuments to protect areas of historic or scientific significance. Many national parks, including Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona and Zion National Park in Utah, began as national monuments.

Monument designations usually prevent most forms of future development, including mining, oil and gas development, and land sales. They also open the door to more resources for research and attract hikers, backpackers and tourists.

When Biden restored the monuments’ size after taking office in 2021, Utah sued to try to reverse his decision. The case was sent back to district court for further arguments just two weeks ago, but Trump’s move to cut the monuments again may disrupt that process.

That court case, or any new litigation to challenge the Trump cuts, could set up a future Supreme Court showdown over the limits of the Antiquities Act.

In 2021, Chief Justice John Roberts indicated that he was skeptical of the way the Antiquities Act has been deployed in recent decades, questioning its use as “a power without any discernible limit to set aside vast and amorphous expanses of terrain above and below the sea.”

His comments seemed directed especially toward Obama, who set a record by preserving more than 500 million acres in primarily marine, underwater landscapes.

The director of the BLM from Trump’s first term, William Perry Pendly, urged in Project 2025 that future Republican administrations defend the shrinking of national monuments in court to set up such a Supreme Court challenge.

Roberts’ 2021 note hinted that he would be open to that opportunity.

“The scope of the objects that can be designated under the Act, and how to measure the area necessary for their proper care and management, may warrant consideration — especially given the myriad restrictions on public use this purely discretionary designation can serve to justify,” Roberts wrote.

In the interim, Trump’s new order could further slow ongoing research in the area.

When Trump first cut the monuments’ size in 2017, it became much harder for scientific researchers to keep up the pace of their work, said Stuart Sumida, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Even after Biden restored them, the ping-ponging of rules made the area difficult to navigate for researchers, he added.

“Bears Ears covers time ranges from upwards of 50 million years ago, before the beginning of the age of dinosaurs, all the way through the age of dinosaurs. It is one of the most important sequences to understanding the history of the Earth that we have in North America, and that seems not to matter to this administration,” Sumida said.

“And Grand Staircase-Escalante is arguably one of the richest areas of dinosaur deposits in the world, and because of this it is scientifically important and hugely important for eco-tourism,” he said.

Money for research into the extraordinary dinosaur record in Utah only started flowing after the monuments were created, Kirkland said. The designation is what helped lead to discoveries about the unusual size and scope of the fossil record.

Now, between the cuts to the monument size and the Trump administration’s attacks on federal science infrastructure, there are very few resources left.

“There’s no money to fund graduate students, so I advise students to go to China,” Kirkland said. “Even the Chinese admit we have the best Mesozoic — age of dinosaurs — record in the world, the most continuous record anywhere, but you just can’t study it here.”