Critics of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument may employ a rarely used law to dramatically change how the monument is managed.
The 1.9-million-acre national monument was established by presidential proclamation in 1996. Its supporters say the BLM-managed monument is a vital wildlife corridor, a haven for some 600 species of native bees, and home to thousands of indigenous and cultural sites as well as a major paleontological site.
In 2017, President Trump downsized the monument by about half, but in 2021, President Biden restored it to its original size.
Now, Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both Republicans, reportedly plan to use the Congressional Review Act to try to undo the monument’s resource management plan.
Representative Maloy has voiced concerns in a social-media video that the management plan of Grand Staircase is too conservation-oriented.
The CRA gives Congress the authority to review and overturn regulations issued by federal agencies such as the BLM or Forest Service. Since 2016, the act, which was very rarely utilized, has been used aggressively.
In 2017, the General Accounting Office decided that resource management plans qualify as “rules” that can be overturned under the act. They had not been regarded as rules before.
So far, a half-dozen management plans have been undone in states including Alaska, Wyoming, and North Dakota
Currently, the Congressional Review Act is also being used in an attempt to overturn a 20-year ban on copper mining in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. A resolution has been introduced in Congress to remove the mining ban there.
Under the CRA, the agency in question cannot replace an overturned rule or management plan with a new one that is substantially similar.
A number of conservation groups are raising concerns about the use of the act. During a recent webinar, Steve Bloch, legal director for the nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said a great deal of confusion could ensue. He said it’s unclear how different a new resource management plan would have to be from the original, and creating a new one would take years, during which time the monument would not have a clear governing plan.
“It is entirely unclear what comes next if the plan is undone,” Bloch said.
During the webinar, Autumn Gillard, a Southern Paiute who is coordinator for the Grand Stairase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, said the monument holds a vast amount of cultural resources
“People say it’s a science monument,” she said, but they are not taking into account “the considerable cultural resources that are there.” She said there has been an enormous amount of looting, vandalism, and desecration of cultural sites, including incidents where people tried to cut panels with rock art out of the rock face to take them home.
“This monument is a very, very sacred landscape for us,” she said.
Gillard said the inter-tribal coalition did not get any notification of the Maloy proposal to scrap the existing RMP, which was developed with input from six tribes: the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Zuni Tribe, Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. She said she felt that the current plan, which was approved in January of 2025, reflected tribal input, and she felt a bridge between the tribe and the government had been achieved. Now, she worries that that the entire monument could be downsized again or even dismantled.
“We really want this land preserved so our people can interact with it, as well as others who love this landscape,” she said.
She said national monuments were created “as America’s jewels, for people to come and enjoy the beauty of this beautiful continent that we live in together.”
