WASHINGTON — President Trump will announce plans next week to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds, reversing actions taken by President Obama after a years-long push by tribal leaders and environmental groups.

Leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Trump plans to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 85 percent and reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half. The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state’s red rock country protected under monument status from more than 3.2 million acres to about 1.2 million acres.

Trump has told Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and other Utah officials that he will follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink both monuments, but the White House and Zinke’s office have not offered details about how they’d redraw the monument boundaries.

Trump is traveling to Utah on Monday and is expected to announce details about his plan to shrink the two monuments, the first and the largest monuments targeted for reduction by Trump after a review of monuments nationwide launched earlier this year.

The proposed changes would be the most significant reductions by any president to monument designations made under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president wide authority to protect federal sites considered historic or geographically or culturally significant.

Trump ordered Zinke to review 27 monuments created in the past two decades, with Bears Ears the top priority. Trump called some monument designations by his Democratic predecessors a “massive federal land grab” that “should never have happened.”

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Obama created the Bears Ears monument last year after tribal leaders and environmental groups clamored for protection of about 1.3 million acres of land considered sacred by Native Americans. The land features thousands of archaeological sites, including cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

Grand Staircase-Escalante, which includes about 1.9 million acres, was created by President Clinton in 1996.

The Washington Post first reported on the documents, which include proclamations that will split both monuments into several smaller ones. The plan would cut the overall size of Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to 201,397 acres and Grand Staircase-Escalante from nearly 1.9 million acres to 997,490 acres.

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department said the newspaper “has very old, outdated and inaccurate information.”

Utah’s Republican leaders, including Hatch, have said the monuments declared by Obama and Clinton unnecessarily locked up too much land and asked Trump to shrink or rescind them.


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