Using the 1906 Antiquities Act to Shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante

The boundaries of America’s public lands are shifting once again. On Monday, President Donald Trump signed executive proclamations reducing the size of two massive national monuments in southern Utah—Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante—by roughly 90 percent. The move revives a decades-long pendulum swing over federal land management in the American West, resetting a legal battle that has spanned four presidential administrations.

To understand the mechanics of this reversal, one must look at the Antiquities Act of 1906, the bedrock law governing American national monuments. Signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, the Act was originally championed by scientists and educators to stop the rampant looting of Indigenous artifacts and archaeological sites across the frontier.

The law gives the president the unilateral power to bypass Congress and immediately designate federal lands as national monuments to protect "objects of historic and scientific interest." Over the last century, 18 presidents have used this authority to protect 168 areas, ranging from the Grand Canyon to marine ecosystems.

However, the 1906 law contains a specific clause that serves as the mechanical lever for the current administration's reversal. The statute mandates that the protected land must be confined to the "smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected."

The Trump administration argues that previous presidents—Bill Clinton, who established Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996, and Barack Obama, who established Bears Ears in 2016—violated this clause. The administration contends that by protecting vast, abstract ecosystems and sweeping vistas, previous executives stretched the law far beyond its original intent of guarding specific, localized antiquities.

By shrinking Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to roughly 131,100 acres, the administration asserts it is bringing the monument back into strict compliance with the statutory text. Grand Staircase-Escalante faces a similar mechanical reduction, dropping from nearly 1.87 million acres to just over 181,500 acres.

On the ground, this 90 percent reduction does not transfer ownership of the land. The excised acreage remains federal property, largely managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). However, removing the "national monument" designation fundamentally changes the rules governing what can happen on that terrain.[1]

Without monument status, the land reverts to standard multiple-use federal management. This opens the previously protected acreage to potential mineral extraction—including known coal reserves in Grand Staircase and uranium deposits near Bears Ears—as well as expanded motorized recreation and commercial leasing.

For Tribal Nations, the reduction dismantles a historic co-management structure. Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the direct request of a coalition of Native American tribes, including the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe.

These tribes argue that the "objects" protected by the Antiquities Act cannot be separated from the broader landscape. To them, the entire region is an interconnected cultural landscape—where the canyons, water sources, and plants are just as vital to their heritage as the physical cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

This clash of interpretations brings the conflict to its ultimate mechanical question: Does the Antiquities Act give a president the power to undo or drastically shrink a predecessor's monument? The text of the 1906 law explicitly grants the executive the power to create monuments, but it is entirely silent on the power to revoke or reduce them.

Legal scholars note that while Congress has the clear constitutional authority to manage federal lands and alter monument boundaries, the executive branch's authority to shrink them remains legally untested at the Supreme Court level. No court has ever definitively ruled on whether the Antiquities Act is a one-way street.[1]

When Trump first reduced these exact monuments during his first term in 2017, a flurry of lawsuits was filed. However, President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries in 2021 before the federal courts could issue a final ruling on the president's revocation power, effectively mooting the cases.

Now, with the 2026 proclamations, the legal clock resets. Conservation groups and the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition have already signaled their intent to return to court, seeking an injunction to block the reductions and protect the landscape from immediate leasing.[1]

The upcoming legal battle will likely force the federal judiciary to finally interpret the "smallest area compatible" clause. A definitive ruling would establish the exact limits of executive power over public lands, determining the fate of millions of acres across the country.

Until that ruling is reached, the shifting boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante will remain the most prominent symbol of the broader American debate over the West—balancing local economic control against landscape-scale preservation.