How Bears Ears is managed today

Bears Ears National Monument has had four sizes in ten years. It was proclaimed at about 1.35 million acres in December 2016, cut to about 201,876 acres in two units in December 2017, restored and enlarged to about 1.36 million acres in October 2021, and cut again by a proclamation signed on 13 July 2026, which took effect on 11 September. The White House fact sheet put the new monument at about 121,100 acres. Reporting on the proclamation’s text describes two units again, Shash Jáa and Indian Creek.

Through every change the ground itself has stayed federal public land. Monument status decides which uses are allowed and how the land is planned. It does not decide who owns it.

Who runs the land

Two agencies manage the Bears Ears country. The Bureau of Land Management, through its Monticello Field Office, runs most of it, including Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge and the country along the San Juan River. The Forest Service runs the high ground of Elk Ridge and the Bears Ears buttes as part of the Manti-La Sal National Forest. That division is older than the monument and has survived every boundary.

Inside the monument, the proclamation sets the purpose: protecting the objects of historic and scientific interest it names. Outside, the excluded land returns to the general rules of each agency’s land use plan, under the multiple-use mandate that allows grazing, mineral leasing, mining claims, timber and motorized recreation where the plan permits. The fact sheet lists those uses as the point of the change. The state’s congressional delegation welcomed it; the tribes, archaeologists and conservation groups that had backed the larger monument opposed it.

The tribes’ role

From 2016 the monument’s proclamations gave five tribes a formal place in its management through the Bears Ears Commission: the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni. In June 2022 the two agencies and the five tribes signed a cooperative agreement under which the Commission took part in writing the management plan and carrying it out.

The July 2026 proclamation dissolved the Commission and replaced it with an advisory committee on which tribal members hold a minority of seats, alongside state and local government appointees. An advisory committee recommends; it does not share decisions as the Commission’s agreement provided. The five tribes condemned both the reduction and the end of the Commission.

The plan

The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service approved a resource management plan for the monument in January 2025, after a public process that began in 2022. It set rules for travel routes, camping, grazing, recreation and the protection of cultural sites across the full 1.36 million acres, and it drew on the Commission’s contributions, including tribal knowledge of the land.

The plan still exists, but its reach has shrunk with the monument. For the land now outside the boundary, the agencies’ older land use plans apply until new planning replaces them: on the Bureau of Land Management’s side the Monticello Field Office’s resource management plan of 2008, and on the Forest Service’s the Manti-La Sal forest plan, first approved in 1986 and amended since. Both were written for a landscape without a monument across most of it, which is the landscape they now govern again. Where the 2025 plan set rules for travel routes or for camping near cultural sites, the question of what still applies on excluded ground is one the agencies’ interim guidance has to answer, and it is the first place to look for changes. In August 2026 the Government Accountability Office gave its opinion that the 2025 plan counts as a rule that Congress can overturn under the Congressional Review Act, which opened another route to undoing it.

In the courts

The lawsuits filed against the 2017 reduction were paused after the 2021 restoration. In September 2026 plaintiffs in those cases asked to reopen them against the new proclamation, and in mid-October 2026 a federal judge in Washington, D.C., lifted the stays on those suits and ordered the government to give 48 hours’ notice before any ground-disturbing work on the excluded lands. How far a president may shrink a monument made by an earlier one has never been settled by the Supreme Court.

What it means on the ground

For a visitor in late 2026, less changes than the acreage suggests. The canyon permit system on Cedar Mesa is run by the field office and was in place long before any monument. Archaeological sites everywhere on federal land remain protected by the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, inside the boundary or out. The Bureau of Land Management’s monument page is the place to watch for the new boundary map, interim guidance and any change to rules or fees, and the court case will decide how long the present arrangement lasts.