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

The two proclamations—designated 9681 and 9682—invoke the Antiquities Act of 1906, a century-old statute granting presidents broad power to designate federal monuments. The legal reading here is key: while the statute explicitly permits designation, it says nothing about reduction or removal. The White House argues this silence means revision power is implied; environmental lawyers and tribal advocates argue the opposite—that absence of stated revocation authority implies it doesn't exist.

The history matters because this is not the first time these monuments have been reshaped. Bears Ears was created by President Obama in 2016, after years of advocacy from tribal nations with ancestral ties to the region. Grand Staircase-Escalante dates to 1996, established by President Clinton. Trump himself cut both monuments in 2017—Bears Ears by roughly 85%, Grand Staircase-Escalante by about half. The Biden administration then restored them administratively. Monday's action essentially resets the landscape to 2017, with a second Trump term and a more developed legal record on both sides.

Earthjustice, the environmental law firm that challenged the 2017 cuts, says it will again litigate. Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney for the group's Rocky Mountain office, framed the core issue: the Antiquities Act permits designation but does not explicitly grant presidents power to dismantle monuments. That argument has been litigated before without a definitive appellate ruling, leaving the legal question unresolved.

Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation citizen and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition—a group representing five tribal nations central to the original 2016 designation—called the reduction "heartbreaking." The coalition's opposition signals that tribal consultation rights and cultural preservation claims will again anchor any court challenge, alongside the environmental groups' statutory arguments.

What stands out across three consecutive administrations is that they have used the Antiquities Act to reshape the same monuments in opposite directions, yet no court has ever definitively settled whether reduction authority exists. That pattern suggests the legal outcome may hinge less on statutory text than on which party occupies the White House—a dynamic that contradicts the Act's original design as a mechanism for durable, apolitical land protection.

Practically speaking, the speed of litigation and any interim court orders will determine how quickly the redrawn boundaries take effect. Federal agencies typically implement boundary changes administratively while lawsuits proceed, meaning land management, grazing permits, mining claims, and access could shift on the excluded acreage well before any final judicial decision. That administrative reality has historically granted each president's redrawn boundaries real-world force for months or years regardless of the eventual legal outcome.