President Trump signed orders Monday to make Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments smaller. Bears Ears loses about 1.15 million acres, and Grand Staircase-Escalante loses about 860,000 acres SLTrib. The White House says those amounts are each close to a million and a half acres The Guardian. Utah's Republican governor attended the signing.

Presidents have the power to create or change national monuments under an old law called the Antiquities Act, passed in 1906. That law lets a president protect land from development. Here is where it gets tangled: the law clearly says presidents can create monuments. It says nothing about shrinking them. Trump's team says that means shrinking them is allowed. Environmental lawyers and tribal leaders say the opposite—if the law doesn't explicitly allow it, presidents cannot do it.

This is the second time Trump has done this. In 2017, during his first presidency, he cut both monuments—Bears Ears by about 85%, Grand Staircase-Escalante by roughly half. President Biden later reversed those cuts and made the monuments big again. Trump's new orders put them back to where they were in 2017.

Bears Ears was created by President Obama in 2016. Native American tribes that live in and have deep historical ties to the area fought for its protection. Grand Staircase-Escalante has existed since 1996, when President Clinton created it. Local politicians opposed him then, just as they oppose monument protection today.

Environmental lawyers say they will sue again to block the shrinking. The main legal argument is straightforward: if a law does not say presidents can erase or reduce a monument, then they cannot do it. This argument has been tested in court before, but judges have never given a final answer.

Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation member and leader of a coalition of five tribal nations with ties to Bears Ears, called the shrinking "heartbreaking." These tribes are also planning to fight the reduction in court. Their argument rests on consultation rights and protecting sacred cultural sites—separate from the legal argument about what the 1906 law actually allows.

Over the past three decades, three different presidents have used the Antiquities Act to reshape these same two monuments in opposite directions. Yet no court has ever said once and for all whether presidents actually have the power to shrink them. This suggests that what matters most may not be what the law says, but which party controls the White House.

While lawsuits proceed, federal agencies will likely start operating under the new, smaller monument boundaries. Grazing rights, mining claims, and access to the excluded land could change long before any judge issues a final ruling. That gives Trump's new boundaries real force on the ground, regardless of what happens in court later.