Two proclamations published in the Federal Register on July 17 shrink a pair of Utah national monuments by roughly nine-tenths. Grand Staircase-Escalante, about 1.9 million acres, is cut by around 90 percent; Bears Ears, 1.36 million acres, by about 91 percent - together close to 3 million acres removed from monument protection [1][2][3]. The politics of that are loud. The legal question underneath is quieter, and unsettled.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives presidents the power to create national monuments, and they have used it roughly 300 times, across both parties [3]. What the law does not say is whether a president may go the other way and shrink a monument a predecessor established. The statute is silent on reduction [3].
That silence has never been resolved in court. The one time it was squarely tested was Trump's own 2017 reductions of these same two monuments - and that case was mooted when President Biden restored the boundaries before the courts ruled on the merits [3]. Which means the authority being exercised this week rests on a question no court has actually answered.
What changes on the ground is concrete. The excised lands lose monument status roughly sixty days after publication, reopening them to uses monument designation had restricted, from mineral and energy development to off-road access, and including areas tribes consider sacred [1][3]. A tribal coordinator, Autumn Gillard, said their perspective 'was not included in these decisions' [3]. The record here is that a 3-million-acre change is being made under a power that has never been tested to completion - and that the lands, and the question of who can protect them, are both now in play [1][2][3].
