WASHINGTON – Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation citizen who co-chairs the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, called the landscape a “living cultural site” hours before President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday reducing it and a neighboring Utah monument by roughly 90 percent, a move her coalition said it would take to federal court.
The order cut the combined protected area of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments from approximately 3 million acres to 300,000 acres, the largest rollback of federal monument protections in modern US history. The acres stripped of monument status – roughly 2.7 million in total – would become eligible for coal mining, uranium extraction, and other resource development under federal land management rules.
Bears Ears, in southeastern Utah’s canyon country, was designated in 2016 by President Obama following years of lobbying by the Inter-Tribal Coalition, which argued the area contains ancestral burial sites, ceremonial grounds, traditional food sources, and archaeological remnants spanning thousands of years. It was the first national monument in the lower 48 states established largely at tribal request. The coalition includes the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe, and Zuni Tribe.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated by President Clinton in 1996 over the objections of Utah’s congressional delegation, which argued the boundary blocked access to the Kaiparowits Plateau’s coal deposits. Trump, speaking after signing Tuesday’s order, echoed that argument. “They took the land from the people quite honestly. We’re giving it back,” Fox News reported him as saying. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who has sought the rollback throughout his tenure, said the original designations exceeded the Antiquities Act’s requirement that monuments cover “the smallest area possible.”
Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, presidents have authority to designate national monuments to protect objects of historic or scientific interest. The law is silent on whether that authority extends to reducing what a prior president designated, and federal courts have so far said it does not. In 2022, a US district court blocked Trump’s first-term rollback of Bears Ears, ruling that presidents lack statutory authority to shrink monuments. The administration did not pursue an appeal before Biden reversed the order; Tuesday’s action arrives under a different legal theory but faces the same foundational challenge.
Earthjustice and other environmental legal organizations said within hours of the signing that they would seek injunctions to halt the order before it takes effect. Federal courts have historically moved quickly in Antiquities Act cases, and the previous Bears Ears litigation produced a preliminary injunction within months. How the current Supreme Court, which has demonstrated a willingness to curtail executive authority in other administrative law domains, treats presidential power under the Antiquities Act is an open question that will likely be answered before any significant extraction begins.
The acreage newly eligible for development includes Kaiparowits Plateau coal, which was considered economically marginal before the 1996 monument designation and remains so given the collapse in US coal demand since 2008. Uranium development on Bears Ears-adjacent land presents a different calculation: domestic uranium demand has risen with the nuclear energy renaissance, and federal officials view domestic supply as a national security matter. Interior Department documents released alongside Tuesday’s order specifically cited uranium as a strategic resource.
The order fits a broader pattern of energy-sector deregulation the Trump administration has pursued across federal lands. Oil prices have climbed to multi-month highs this summer as geopolitical risk premiums mount, a backdrop the administration has used to justify accelerating domestic extraction approvals regardless of the litigation those decisions invite.
For the five tribes in the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the legal and economic arguments are secondary to what Tuesday’s order communicates. The monument was the first federal land protection established primarily at tribal request in the modern era. Its reduction signals that the protection was conditional, that any future tribal-backed conservation effort faces the same vulnerability to an administration with different priorities. Smith-Idjesa, speaking before the signing, said the monument preserves “histories, ceremonies, traditional foods, medicines, and ancestral sites” that no court order can restore once the land is cleared for extraction.
Whether Tuesday’s order survives federal review will determine what actually happens on the ground. Mine permitting, environmental review, and project financing for the newly exposed acreage would take years even without a court injunction. But the signal sent to the five tribes who lobbied for Bears Ears does not depend on a single shovel of uranium ore ever being extracted.
