President Trump signed orders on Monday to reduce protections on nearly 3 million acres in southern Utah, slashing the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. The Grand Staircase-Escalante will lose nearly 1.7 million of its 1.87 million acres, while Bears Ears will shrink from 1.36 million acres to about 121,000, according to axios.com.
The reductions are more drastic than Trump’s 2017 cuts, which eliminated almost half of Grand Staircase-Escalante and 85% of Bears Ears, the largest federal land protection rollback at that time. The Biden administration had restored the original boundaries in 2021 and added 12,000 acres to Bears Ears. The latest cuts follow Trump’s 2025 directive to identify public lands for expanded drilling and mining in the West, per axios.com.
The practicality of resource extraction in these areas has been debated. While drilling leases were nominated before Biden’s restoration of Bears Ears, Utah officials noted minimal energy potential within the monument. Uranium mining is more feasible, and one uranium mine reopened inside Bears Ears after the 2017 reductions. Grand Staircase-Escalante contains a large coal deposit, though mining there was previously deemed unprofitable, axios.com reports.
The new boundaries reduce protections on over 90% of each monument’s area, marking a significant rollback of federal land conservation in Utah. This move follows a pattern of federal policy shifts affecting public lands in the region over the past decade, according to axios.com.