President Trump signed proclamations Monday afternoon shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, cutting roughly 1.15 million acres from Bears Ears and about 860,000 acres from Grand Staircase-Escalante SLTrib. Trump described the reductions at a White House signing event as "close to a million and a half acres each" for the two monuments The Guardian. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, joined him for the signing.

The Bears Ears modification, designated Proclamation 9681, excludes approximately 1.15 million acres while reserving roughly 11,200 acres within the monument's boundaries White House. The Grand Staircase-Escalante modification, Proclamation 9682, removes approximately 860,000 acres from that monument's footprint White House. Both proclamations invoke the president's authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the century-old statute that gives presidents unilateral power to designate — and, in this administration's reading, to redraw — federal monuments.

Bears Ears was created by President Obama in 2016, a designation that followed years of advocacy from a coalition of tribal nations with ancestral and cultural ties to the region. Grand Staircase-Escalante dates to 1996, established by President Clinton over the objections of Utah's congressional delegation at the time. Both monuments sit atop a legal and political fault line that has run through federal land policy for three decades, one that pits presidential discretion over public lands against local resource-development interests and tribal sovereignty claims.

This is not new territory for either monument or for Trump himself. He first ordered reductions to both sites in 2017, during his first term, cutting Bears Ears by roughly 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by about half at the time. Those cuts triggered immediate litigation and were never fully resolved in court before the Biden administration reversed them administratively, restoring the original boundaries. Monday's action effectively resets that fight to where it stood in 2017, with the added wrinkle of a second Trump term and a more fully developed legal record on both sides.

Earthjustice, the environmental law firm that led prior challenges to the 2017 cuts, said it would again take legal action against the reductions The Guardian. Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney for the group's Rocky Mountain office, framed the core legal question succinctly: the Antiquities Act, she argued, gives presidents power to designate monuments but not to dismantle them. That argument — that the statute's silence on revocation or reduction implies the absence of that power — has been litigated before without a definitive appellate ruling squarely on point, leaving the question legally live rather than settled.

Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation citizen and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, called the reduction "heartbreaking." The coalition, representing five tribal nations with historical ties to the Bears Ears landscape, was central to the original 2016 designation push and to the campaign against the 2017 cuts. Its renewed opposition signals that the tribal coalition's standing arguments — grounded in consultation rights and cultural preservation interests distinct from the environmental groups' statutory claims — will again feature prominently in any court challenge.

The recurring cycle here is worth pausing on. Three administrations in a row have now used the Antiquities Act's broad designation language to reshape the same two monuments in opposite directions, without a court ever definitively resolving whether reduction authority exists at all. That pattern suggests the underlying legal question may be less important to the outcome than which party holds the White House at a given moment — a dynamic that undercuts the Antiquities Act's original premise of durable, apolitical land protection.

The practical effects of Monday's proclamations will depend heavily on how quickly litigation moves and what interim relief, if any, courts grant. Land management practices, permitting for grazing, mining claims, and recreational access on the excluded acreage could shift well before any final judicial ruling, since federal agencies typically implement boundary changes administratively pending court intervention. That administrative reality has historically given each president's redrawn boundaries real-world effect for months or years regardless of the eventual legal outcome, and it is likely to do so again here.