Many southern Utah residents are reeling this week from news that President Donald Trump has signed proclamations to dramatically shrink two national monuments here – the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.

In a signing ceremony Monday in Washington, D.C., surrounded by Utah’s Republican political leaders, the president announced that he would reduce the size of the monuments by nearly 90%, cutting 3 million of the almost 3.5 million acres.

“We’ve done something that was, I think, very desperately needed,” President Trump said during the signing. “It was very unfair to the people of Utah. And now fairness has been brought back.”

Why We Wrote This

President Donald Trump’s says his move to dramatically shrink to Utah national monuments will open the land to needed energy extraction. Opponents say they are “heartbroken,” and they expect a new fight over the importance of federal lands.

The president said his proclamations would give Utah residents more ability to use the land. But locals here say the reasons for shrinking the monuments don’t hold up, and that the land has never been more accessible to the public than it has been with its national monument designation. The only difference for this expanse of wilderness now after Monday’s orders, say lawyers and locals involved in the fight to protect the area, is that the land is open to leases for mineral and energy extraction.

The land is still owned federally, despite the longtime fight by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox for bringing Utah’s vast public land system back into state control.

“They are preying on people’s misunderstanding about how public lands are managed and how these laws are because access was never denied with or without a national monument,” says Morgan Sjogren, a local author who is starting up her own guiding business, but now worries about its future. “The focus has been on these very divisive attitudes about public lands that are old.”

Then-President Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument in 1996 under the Antiquities Act, a law from the turn of the 20th century that allows presidents to unilaterally set aside public land as national monuments to protect landmarks or objects of “historic or scientific interest.” Nearby Bears Ears, an area of cultural significance to tribal nations, was designated as a monument by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Ever since President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act in 1906, every president (including Mr. Trump) except for three has designated national monuments. There are now 168, including protected marine areas. Many of these monuments later became some of the country’s most iconic national parks: Arizona’s Grand Canyon, Maine’s Acadia, and Utah’s Zion all started as monuments.

But the sweeping power of the Antiquities Act has long been a focus of conservatives who disagree with the federal government’s control over so much public land in the West. During his first administration, Mr. Trump ordered his Interior Department to review all national monuments over 100,000 acres – and he soon set his sights on southern Utah. In 2017, Trump ordered the largest ever reduction in national monument protections, cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante by almost half and Bears Ears cut by 85%.

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Opponents immediately filed lawsuits. But before those cases progressed, President Joe Biden came into office. He restored both monuments to their original sizes in 2021.

The same legal disputes are likely to soon start up again, as debates over the Antiquities Act continue. The “crux” of the legal question, says Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is if the law allows presidents to not only establish national monuments, but also shrink previous designations.