President Donald Trump’s decision to shrink Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has reignited a familiar fight over public lands. But it also raises a more fundamental question: if it is troubling for one president to shrink a national monument unilaterally, why was it not just as troubling for a previous president to create one spanning nearly 2 million acres in the first place?
Former President Bill Clinton created Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996, reserving approximately 1.7 million acres as a national monument and withdrawing those lands from new mineral leasing, mining, and other forms of productive use allowed under public land statutes. The area of the monument contains significant deposits of coal and oil sands, highlighting the economic resources that can be placed off limits when presidents unilaterally impose sweeping land-use restrictions. Trump reduced the monument in 2017, President Joe Biden restored it to approximately 1.87 million acres in 2021, and Trump reduced it again this summer to approximately 181,500 acres.
