Nearly 3 million acres across Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante lost federal monument protections Monday under orders signed by President Trump, cuts more drastic than anything from his first term. The resource argument complicates the political one: Utah officials have said Bears Ears holds "very little energy potential," and coal extraction at Grand Staircase-Escalante was not considered profitable even when Trump opened that land in 2017.
The scale of the rollback
Grand Staircase-Escalante will lose nearly 1.7 of its 1.87 million acres. Bears Ears, which covers 1.36 million acres, will shrink to roughly 121,000. Both figures exceed Trump's first-term reductions by a wide margin. In 2017, he eliminated almost half of Grand Staircase-Escalante and 85% of Bears Ears in what was then the largest reduction of federal land protections in American history. President Biden restored both monuments in 2021 and added 12,000 acres to Bears Ears. Monday's orders reverse that restoration and go further.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was created by the Clinton administration in 1996 as the largest U.S. national monument at the time. Bears Ears was established by President Obama in 2016 to be managed in cooperation with Indigenous tribes near the Four Corners. Both have drawn sustained opposition from Utah Republicans, who have long argued for smaller boundaries to allow potential expansion of drilling, mining, off-roading, and grazing.
What the resource picture actually shows
The practical case for extraction is mixed. Bears Ears holds limited hydrocarbon potential, by Utah officials' own assessment. Uranium mining is a more realistic prospect there: conservation groups say one uranium mine was reopened within the monument after Trump's first-term cuts. At Grand Staircase-Escalante, a large coal deposit exists within the original boundaries, but companies did not find it profitable to develop after Trump's 2017 reductions.
Some protection persists even within the newly removed acreage. Portions of the former monument land remain designated as federal Wilderness Study Areas or Areas of Environmental Concern, both of which carry development restrictions. The read-through on that buffer is uncertain: the Interior Department announced last month a review of policies around Wilderness Study Areas, which conservation groups say could erode the protections those designations provide.
The counterargument
The legal challenge to these cuts carries weight and is not hypothetical. Courts have not settled whether a president holds the authority to unilaterally undo a predecessor's monument proclamation. A lawsuit filed in 2017 after Trump's first round of cuts argued he lacked that power. A separate suit brought by Utah officials in 2022 sought to block Biden's restoration of the monuments; a federal judge dismissed it in 2023, but an appeals court revived it last month. Trump's new orders may moot that specific case, but the underlying constitutional question will almost certainly be relitigated directly against Monday's action.
On balance
The policy signal is unambiguous: the administration wants western public lands open for energy and mineral development. The economics remain what they were before the cuts. Bears Ears holds limited hydrocarbon value by Utah's own measure, and Grand Staircase-Escalante's coal was passed over as uneconomic during Trump's first term. The line to watch is not the land register but the docket: an appeals court that revived a monument-boundary lawsuit just last month now has far more contested ground to examine.