The orders aren’t a surprise. Trump reduced the monuments’ boundaries during his first term in 2017. At that time, he halved Grand Staircase’s size and cut Bears Ears’ by 83%. Both monuments were then restored in 2021 by former President Joe Biden.

Conservation groups immediately condemned Trump’s latest move as unlawful and have vowed to take legal action against it.

The change could have real impacts on everything from native plants and wildlife to dark skies, said Jackie Grant, who directs Grand Staircase Escalante Partners. She’s especially concerned about the monument’s wilderness study areas, which are undeveloped.

“It seems like this is laying the groundwork to further degrade and develop the national monument by opening up other areas that we thought were protected to development and extraction,” Grant said.

The changes are part of Trump’s broader push to increase oil and gas production on American public lands after declaring a “national energy emergency” in early 2025. Combined with Trump’s order to rapidly accelerate the permitting process for energy development on federal land, new mining projects could potentially now be fast-tracked.

The Bear Ears proclamation specifically calls out the minerals in the area the administration says are critical to national security, such as copper and uranium.

The order also walks back years of cooperation between the federal government and local Indigenous leaders to manage the monuments.

Bears Ears’ management plan from early 2025 was the culmination of a first-of-its-kind collaboration between federal agencies and the five tribes of the Bears Ears Commission — Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Zuni Tribe, Hopi Tribe and the Navajo Nation. The goal was to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into balancing public use and protection of cultural and natural resources. The Biden-era management plan for Grand Staircase also had input from Native tribes.

The southern Utah landscapes have been home to Native peoples since time immemorial, said Autumn Gillard, a Southern Paiute woman and coordinator with the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition. And reducing the monument’s protections could expose the lands to potential destruction.

“These are very sacred cultural landscapes, and they are very near and dear to tribes,” Gillard said. “We are very disappointed to see that our perspective was not included in these decisions that were made.”

Her coalition said Grand Staircase contains thousands of significant cultural places, including sacred sites, ancestral dwellings and petroglyphs. According to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, that monument’s landscape has more than 100,000 archeological sites that represent the homelands of several tribes.

Before Trump’s action, Grand Staircase covered nearly 1.9 million acres in south-central Utah. Former President Bill Clinton designated it in 1996 using the power of the Antiquities Act. Former President Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016. The southeast Utah monument previously protected 1.36 million acres.

The Antiquities Act allows presidents to move quickly to preserve historic, scientific and cultural sites through executive action, and presidents have used it to protect land hundreds of times since 1906. Gov. Cox and other Republican state leaders have continued to argue that expansive monuments go beyond what the act intended.

Utah political leaders have long fought against the designations, saying they further federal government overreach in the state.

Sen. Mike Lee led an effort in early 2026 to use the Congressional Review Act to change Grand Staircase’s rules, potentially opening more of its land to vehicles and energy development. The effort ultimately failed, but it drew support from the delegation, Cox and the commissioners of Garfield and Kane counties.

Following Trump’s signing, Rep. Celeste Maloy said the president’s actions are in response to the people of Utah.

“We know you value this land,” she said. “You want it used for multiple-use and not locked up, and so this is a very different process than how the monuments were created.”

Still, some surveys suggest that most Utahns favor protecting the monuments.

A public opinion poll commissioned by the conservation group Grand Canyon Trust in 2024 indicated that nearly two-thirds of Utah voters support maintaining the current size and number of the state’s national monuments. Colorado College’s 2025 Conservation in the West poll also showed that 82% of Utahns supported leaving national monument designations in place.

In a state with a big outdoor tourism industry, the monuments also have economic impacts. A recent analysis from independent research group Headwaters Economics showed that Grand Staircase, Bears Ears and other national monuments boost local economies as visitation increases.

Fuck liggeralism

>>1523853
You will never make fetch happen.

fuck this guy

>>1523874
based

>>1523844
What a douche.

it's just a bunch of rocks and dirt with mineral rights underneath. exploitable. nobody lives there.

>>1523895
>nobody lives there.
That's the point. The land was supposed to be preserved for future generations and not raped by mining and logging companies.

>>1523844
Why have sacred outdoor spaces when you can have fracking chemicals in the ground water, oil spills from leaking pipes going into pristine desert springs, and massive AI data centers on that land?

>>1523898
>>1523899
The rape is the point. MAGA follows this machismo ideology where nature must be defeated, broken, and dominated. That's a big part of why they hate green energy, for example; it NOT polluting is an actual negative, because that's not manly. It's exactly as stupid as it sounds.

>>1523900
Teddy did better machismo, need more of that. Being a manly man that loves the outdoors is way better than this bullshit.

>>1523904
Teddy got shot, stared down his attacker, managed to do a 50 minute speech, and then went to the hospital. Trump barely had his ear grazed and cried like a little bitch.

>>1523904
For sure. This is the machismo of weak men.

>>1523900
Fucking Captain Planet villain type shit.

>>1523906
This isn't even machismo anymore. It's a copy of a copy of a copy of machismo. A spoiled nepo baby who doesn't understand strength, courage, or masculinity doing an exaggerated cosplay of what he thinks a manly man looks like to cover up insecurities ironically caused by the fact that he has no idea what he's actually imitating.

We must destroy nature for the benefit of the rich class because

a) That is who this country exists for
b) They clearly have won and you are a loser
c) You were born merely for their benefit
d) You are lazy

>>1523923
cry more demrat treehugger lmao