| Updated: 3:19 p.m.
With the stroke of a pen, President Joe Biden could return Utah’s two largest national monuments to their original sizes. Instead, he opted to open a 60-day review into how his predecessor shrunk the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by 2 million acres, leaving open a range of options for the new administration.
An executive order issued Wednesday instructs the Interior Secretary, a post likely to be filled by Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico, to submit findings and recommendations for moving forward on the future of these landscapes that have been ground zero in Utah’s public lands battles going back nearly a century.