Conservation groups are expressing relief that Congress appears unlikely to throw out the management plan for Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
“We celebrate with gratitude today that Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s 2025 management plan still stands,” said Autumn Gillard, Southern Paiute, the monument’s Inter-Tribal Coalition coordinator, in a release.
“That plan, for the first time, heeded our voices and our traditional knowledge by establishing a framework for Tribal co-stewardship over our ancestral lands. Overturning Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan using the Congressional Review Act would have been a direct strike against the federal government’s duty to consult with tribes. Grand Staircase’s resource management plan protects cultural places, petroglyphs, pictographs, and structures. These places are still important for traditions, ceremonies, and domestic life.”
In March, Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both Republicans and advocates of selling off some public lands, introduced measures in both houses of Congress that would have discarded the management plan adopted in 2025. The Bureau of Land Management would then have been forced to create a new plan that was “substantially different.”
But the U.S. Senate failed to act on the bill by June 11. That deadline was significant because until that date, just a simple majority vote was needed in the Senate. Now, a 60-vote majority is required.
The measures would have used the Congressional Review Act to dump the existing plan In 2017, the federal General Accounting Office decided that resource management plans qualify as “rules” that can be overturned under the Congressional Review Act.
That act was used earlier this year to nullify a mining ban in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.
“This is a major victory for the millions of Americans who care deeply about the Grand Staircase and for everyone who supports our nation’s wildest public lands and wants to see them protected,” said Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, in a release.
The 1.9-million-acre monument, designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996, is a significant wildlife corridor, a haven for 600 species of native bees, and home to thousands of indigenous and cultural sites.
The current management plan was developed after two years of work and public input The plan includes a tribal co-stewardship framework, honors legally required tribal consultation, and recognizes the government-to-government relationship between tribes and the U.S. government.
“Removing the plan would have created a greater risk of looting, vandalism, graffiti, and degradation,” Gllard said in the release. “Tribes are the original stewards of these lands, and we are thankful that our voices will still be consulted as such.”
"As a Diné woman, I speak from my perspective and from the teachings of Hózhó, which call us to live in balance and to care for the land in a good way,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa, Grand Staircase Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition Navajo representative, in the release. “Grand Staircase-Escalante is a living ancestral homeland, and our responsibility to protect it comes from the teachings passed down by our ancestors long before any federal designation. We, too, as Navajo people, have ancestral homes and cultural connections within this landscape.”
Congress could still try to utilize the Congressional Review Act to overturn the management plan, but that will be more difficult now because of the 60 votes needed in the Senate.
