“Today’s action makes it clear that Utah is the epicenter of Republican efforts to dismantle and obliterate America’s system of public lands. President Trump’s outrageous attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monument was taken at the urging of Utah politicians – Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis, Governor Spencer Cox, and the others – who championed this action. These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation.” - Scott Braden, Executive Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA)
“The new Administration must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906,” says Project 2025 and today, July 13, President Trump took action that might make that a reality.
The Trump administration’s Project 2025 assignment to (attempt to) destroy our public lands, waters, and wildlife in favor of industry is nearing completion.
At the start of this year, the administration had already either initiated or completed about 80% of all recommended actions outlined in Project 2025.
So far this year, they’ve worked hard on the other 20%, from revising certain definitions under the Endangered Species Act, cancelling offshore wind projects, and rescinding the Public Lands Rule to issuing drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, loosening regulations related to oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, rescinding the Roadless Rule, and overturning a mining ban near the Boundary Waters.
Yes, all of those things are either specifically outlined or implied in Project 2025.
Among a number of minor ones, there’s one major action they hadn’t yet taken, however. Up until today, that is.
Today, July 13, 2026, President Trump—similar to what he did in his first term, but much worse actually—launched an all-out attack on the Antiquities Act by once again shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by signing two presidential proclamations.
What happened in the Oval Office today is arguably the biggest assault on public lands protections in modern U.S. history.
He was surrounded by a host of anti-public-land politicians, including Utah governor Spencer Cox, Representative Celeste Maloy, Senator John Curtis, and the gleefully smiling Senator Mike Lee.
Maloy and Lee had tried to use the Congressional Review Act to undo the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan recently, an attempt that failed on June 12 when their deadline expired.
Now, almost exactly one month later, they’re back and they’ve gotten the president himself involved. This is serious stuff.
Lee seemed to have the day of his life. In fact, Governor Cox pretty much admitted that this was all Mike Lee’s doing, saying that “Senator Lee has been very involved conversing with [President Trump].”
Very few areas of protected public lands have been as controversial as those two national monuments in Utah.
For a decade, the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments have shifted with the party controlling the White House. Protected by Democratic presidents, significantly reduced by Donald Trump during his first term, then restored by Joe Biden.
Now, the two monuments have been even more drastically reduced by Trump—they’ve been literally decimated.
More details below but first, some historical context.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was established by President Bill Clinton in September 1996, protecting roughly 1.7 million acres of cliffs, canyons, plateaus, and badlands in southern Utah. It was the first national monument managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and one of the largest monument designations in the Lower 48.
The proclamation was controversial from the beginning. Utah officials complained—and once again did so during today’s Oval Office event—that Clinton had announced it without adequately consulting state leaders. Mining interests objected because the designation complicated plans to develop coal deposits beneath the Kaiparowits Plateau.
Conservationists, on the other hand, countered that the monument preserved one of the country’s largest intact landscapes, along with an extraordinary fossil record—which is also why there are fossil fuels in the region—that has since produced discoveries of dinosaurs and other species previously unknown to science.
Bears Ears followed 20 years later. President Barack Obama designated the monument in December 2016 after years of advocacy by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, composed of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni.
The original monument encompassed about 1.35 million acres containing cliff dwellings, rock art, ceremonial places, ancestral villages, and other evidence of more than 13,000 years of Indigenous presence.
That designation represented something new in federal conservation. Tribes were not merely consulted after the boundaries had been drawn—they had helped conceive the monument and proposed a system in which Indigenous knowledge would guide its management.
The Bears Ears National Monument “designation marks the first time Native American tribes successfully advocated for the protection of their ancestral lands as a national monument,” says the Grand Canyon Trust, which advocates for permanent protections for national monuments on the Colorado Plateau.
Trump, however, moved quickly to overhaul both designations during his first term.
After ordering a review of large national monuments in April 2017, he traveled to Salt Lake City that December and, upon the recommendations of then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, signed proclamations reducing Bears Ears by roughly 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half.
The land itself, however, didn’t change ownership. It remained publicly owned and federally managed.
What did change was the level of protection: areas excluded from the monuments could once again become available for activities such as mining, drilling, road construction, and other development under ordinary public-land laws.
Tribes, conservation organizations, archaeologists, and outdoor businesses immediately sued. Their central argument was straightforward: The Antiquities Act of 1906, which was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, authorizes presidents to create national monuments, but it does not explicitly authorize them to abolish or substantially reduce monuments created by their predecessors. That power, they argued, belongs to Congress.
The courts never resolved that question. After taking office, Biden reviewed Trump’s actions and, on October 8, 2021, restored both monuments. The lawsuits were put on hold.
Now, these new Trump proclamations—Modifying the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Modifying the Bears Ears National Monument—do much more than just reopen an old regional public-lands dispute. In fact, they go far beyond what he did during his first term.
This time, President Trump reduced the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from roughly 1.87 million acres to approximately 181,500 acres. (The first time, he left 1 million acres.)
He reduced the size of Bears Ears National Monument from about 1.36 million acres to approximately 121,100 acres. (Last time, he left about 228,000 acres.)
In total, the president reduced public-land protections from 3,230,000 acres to 302,600 acres. That’s a 90% “downward adjustment,” as Project 2025 calls it.
Altogether, more than 2,925,000 acres lost monument protections today—by far the largest rollback of public-land protections in U.S. history.
“We did something that was desperately needed,” President Trump said, “it was very unfair to the people of Utah,” clearly unaware that national monuments are insanely popular among all kinds of voters in the West, including MAGA voters.
In fact, according to a poll by Colorado College published earlier this year, a supermajority of 91% western voters say national monuments should remain protected. Even among voters who identify with the MAGA movement, support is nearly as high—an eye-opening 87% of them don’t want national monuments to shrink or be eliminated.
Now, the president said, “[the people of Utah] will be able to use it a little bit,” again obviously clueless about the amazing recreation opportunities that are currently available all over the two monuments, from hunting, fishing, and target shooting to boating, hiking, camping, and rock climbing.
This presidential action, pushed by the entire Utah congressional delegation, deliberately revives the initial unanswered legal question from 2017—“can a president shrink or abolish national monuments?”
This move potentially puts that question on a direct path to the Supreme Court, which would then rule on a president’s authority to shrink national monuments under the Antiquities Act or even eliminate them altogether.
If the Supreme Court were to rule that a president could, in fact, abolish a national monument, the Antiquities Act would effectively be dead. If that happens, all national monuments established in the past by a president and not protected by an act of Congress would be on the chopping block.
That’s essentially all 31 national monuments currently managed by the BLM, from Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears to Arizona’s Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon, California’s Chuckwalla, New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, and Montana’s Upper Missouri River Breaks.
And getting the Antiquities Act to the Supreme is an explicit goal of Project 2025, which says that “the new Administration must vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
It also says that the first Trump administration’s shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante “was insufficient in that only two national monuments in one state (Utah) were adjusted.”
It then recommends the downward adjustment of a national monument in Maine and one in Oregon, adding that the “new Administration’s review will permit a fresh look at past monument decrees and new ones by President Biden.”
I warned about this in my piece about Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in January, when I wrote that the “administration still has about 20% of Project 2025’s public lands actions to initiate, including monument reductions. We could see the start of that in 2026.”
After the vehemently anti-public-lands Steve Pearce was confirmed as director of the Bureau of Land Management in May, I wrote an entire piece about how national monuments could soon be targeted:
“The question now is not only how Pearce will manage grazing permits, oil and gas leasing, mining approvals, renewable energy applications, or wild horse controversies. It’s also whether he will help the Trump administration reopen one of the most consequential public-lands fights of the last decade: the effort to shrink, weaken, or even abolish national monuments.”
And here we are…
This won’t stop with just Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.
The repeal of the Antiquities Act is the goal.
Once again, lawsuits will be filed by environmental organizations, probably as soon as today.
“Today’s action makes it clear that Utah is the epicenter of Republican efforts to dismantle and obliterate America’s system of public lands,” said Scott Braden, Executive Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA).
“President Trump’s outrageous attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monument was taken at the urging of Utah politicians – Senators Mike Lee and John Curtis, Governor Spencer Cox, and the others – who championed this action. These two landscapes deserve to be protected for current and future generations of Utahns and Americans, not opened to exploitation.”
“The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is committed to defending the monuments and will challenge this unlawful decision in federal court. We are confident that President Trump’s reckless and unlawful acts will be rejected and the Monuments restored.”
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram
Image 1: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, credit: Tim Peterson
Image 2: Screenshot from the Oval Office signing ceremony
Image 3: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, credit: Tim Peterson
Image 4: Bears Ears National Monument, credit: Tim Peterson
Image 5: Bears Ears National Monument, credit: Tim Peterson
Image 6: Screenshot from Project 2025
This rollback is an opportunity to reinforce one of the central arguments behind Designing Nature’s Half: conservation that depends primarily on the political priorities of a single administration will always remain vulnerable to the next one (if there is a next one!).
The reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is more than an attack on two extraordinary landscapes. It is another reminder that conservation built primarily through executive authority can be undone by executive authority. I personally experienced that under Trump 1.0 when he downsized Bears Ears NM despite public input that expressed a clear desire to preserve its boundaries.
That should concern everyone who cares about America’s public lands.
We should absolutely fight these rollbacks in the courts, through Congress, and at the ballot box. But we should also ask a harder question: How do we build conservation systems that endure beyond election cycles?
For me, the answer lies in strengthening regional, multi-stakeholder institutions that bring together Tribal nations, local communities, landowners, public agencies, scientists, conservation organizations, and businesses to collaboratively design and steward landscapes over the long term.
This is the vision behind my soon-to-be-released book: Designing Nature’s Half. Landscape conservation design (LCD) provides the collaborative process for developing shared, science-informed conservation strategies at the scale ecosystems actually function. Durable regional institutions can provide the continuity to carry those strategies forward, even when federal priorities shift.
The lesson from today isn’t that federal protection doesn’t matter—it absolutely does. It’s that lasting conservation cannot depend on Washington, DC alone. Like our founding fathers before us, conservationists of all stripes must rally together and take action, despite what Washington does (or doesn’t do).
If we’re serious about protecting biodiversity for generations, we need to begin building the collaborative institutions that can outlast any single president.
Power to the People!