On July 13, 2026, Trump signed proclamations stripping protection from roughly three million acres of southern Utah, shrinking two national monuments by about 90 percent in what conservation groups called the largest rollback of public-land protections in U.S. history.
Bears Ears drops from about 1.36 million acres to roughly 121,100. Grand Staircase-Escalante drops from about 1.87 million acres to roughly 181,500. The Bears Ears proclamation points to minerals the administration calls critical to national security, including copper and uranium, and the reductions reopen the excised land to mining and development.
The legal theory is contested. Trump acted under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which lets presidents create monuments. Whether it lets them dismantle monuments a predecessor created is the open question. “The Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to designate national monuments, not to destroy them,” said Heidi McIntosh of Earthjustice. Rep. Jared Huffman said Trump “illegally opened up two of the most extraordinary landscapes in America at the behest of polluting corporations.”
The land is not empty. The Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition said its tribes “were not informed of or asked about this decision, and that's unacceptable.” This is the second time Trump has cut both monuments; President Biden restored them in 2021 after Trump's first-term reductions in 2017, and the new proclamations will again be challenged in court.