President Trump made a public lands declaration Monday unlike any ever made by a U.S. chief executive. The president shrank two big national monuments in southern Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — by nearly 2 million acres.

"Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” he told a cheering audience at the Utah Capitol. “And guess what, they're wrong."

With his redesignation, he said, “Public lands will once again be for public use.”

The president’s actions were a dramatic departure from conventional interpretations of the 1906 Antiquities Act, on which the monument designations are based. The act, advocated by President Theodore Roosevelt, was designed to provide safeguards to exceptional historic, cultural, and natural landscapes across the country, most of them located in the West’s public domain.