AP News53%
What to know about Trump’s order shrinking the size of 2 national monuments in Utah 3%
By MATTHEW BROWN19% HANNAH SCHOENBAUM18%
7/13/2026, 3:28:36 PM
Keywords: Donald Trump, Utah, National Parks, Bears Ears National Monument, Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, Antiquities Act, Public Lands, Conservation, Mining, Tribal Co Stewardship, Joe Biden, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight D Eisenhower, Matthew Brown, Hannah Schoenbaum
BS Summary: This article contains 6 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Availability Heuristic, and In-Group Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 18.5% saturation with 123 hits. Analysis detected 212 faulty-reasoning hits from 666 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 16% and a BS Rank of 3% (21,230 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.00% of the article peer group.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Revisiting actions from his first term that were reversed, President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will scale back the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.
Trump made similar moves during his first term, but many were reversed by his successor, President Joe Biden.
The back-and-forth underscores how national monuments have become a flashpoint over the management of public lands.
Trump is not the first president to reduce the size of monuments.
Here’s a look at U.S. national monuments and presidents who have created or reshaped them:
How many national monuments have Biden and Trump acted on?
Trump made only a handful of Antiquities Act proclamations during his first term, including two that reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments.
The sprawling Utah monuments include stunning natural features and sites sacred to some Native American tribes.
Grand Staircase-Escalante also holds large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium.
State officials, conservationists and tribes react
Proponents of the reductions said the protective boundaries stretched too far and hindered mining for essential minerals.
“Our connection to this place cannot be erased by the stroke of a pen,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
Is it legal to shrink or eliminate monuments?
Environmental groups have argued the Antiquities Act is a one-way road that allows presidents to create but not undo monuments.
But there’s a history of presidents taking actions similar to Trump’s.
Since 1912, presidents have issued more than a dozen proclamations that diminished monuments, according to a National Park Service database.
How long have presidents been creating monuments?
President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act after a generation of lobbying by educators and scientists who wanted to protect sites from commercial artifact looting and haphazard collecting by individuals.
It was the first law in the U.S. to establish legal protections for cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.
On Sept.
24, 1906, Roosevelt used it to designate a national monument at Devils Tower — a giant rock butte in eastern Wyoming that later gained fame as the focus of the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
All but three presidents have used the act to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.
Brown reported from Billings, Mont.
Combined, the two monuments spanned more than 3.2 million acres (13 million hectares), an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Trump reduced them Monday to less than 303,000 acres (123,000 hectares) combined — a greater reduction than his first term.
He framed the move as giving back land to the people.
The order was applauded by Utah officials, who have long argued that the state should manage its own lands.
“The question has never been whether to protect them, but how to protect them best,” said Gov.
Spencer Cox, a Republican.
His office assured the lands left out of the modified boundaries “remain protected under existing federal and state law.”
But some conservationists and citizens of local tribal nations warned the order opens the door to mining while disrespecting tribal co-stewardship.
Bears Ears is jointly managed by an agreement between tribal nations and federal agencies.
“Our connection to this place cannot be erased by the stroke of a pen,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
How is a national monument different from a national park or forest?
Unlike national parks, which are established by Congress, most of the more than 100 national monuments were created by presidents.
They’re governed by one or more agencies such as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A designation provides sweeping protections not just for significant geological features or artifacts but also for the surrounding landscape, banning drilling, mining and new construction.
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0%flagged-word coverageDavina Smith-Idjesa
62 attributed words78% of attributed speech36% writer coverage
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