Congress could throw out the resource management plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, using an obscure rule called the Congressional Review Act.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is intended to be an oversight tool that allows Congress to overturn certain rules made by federal agencies. Utah’s congressional delegation, spearheaded by Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy, requested that the Government Accountability Office (the main auditing institution for the federal government) determine whether the Grand Staircase-Escalante resource management plan (RMP) would qualify as a rule, and therefore be subject to the CRA. Maloy sent the letter requesting the review in July.
Last week, the GAO issued an opinion, saying that the RMP would qualify as a rule. That means that any member of Congress could introduce a bill with a “resolution of disapproval” for the resource management plan. It would only need a simple majority in both chambers of Congress for the plan to be thrown out. It is expected that Maloy or another member of Utah’s delegation will introduce such a bill this year.
In 2017, the first Trump administration drastically reduced the size of the monument, located in southern Utah by about 47%, from nearly 1.9 million acres to around 1 million acres. In 2021, the Biden administration restored Grand Staircase to its original 1996 boundaries. The monument then needed a new RMP to reflect its newly-restored boundaries, which the Bureau of Land Management began drafting in 2022. The plan was finalized and went into effect in January of 2025.
Because Grand Staircase-Escalante is a national monument, the resource management plan prioritized conservation and protection of natural and cultural resources. It withdraws the 1.9 million acres from mineral production and extraction, limits grazing, manages recreation, and creates new Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.
In a social media video, Maloy said she’s made no secret of her opposition to the RMP, and had opposed it before she was elected to Congress, working as an attorney in southwestern Utah.
“The locals oppose it. Trail users oppose it. The local agricultural community opposes it,” she said in the video. “It undercuts rural economic development.”
“My constituents have been telling me they don’t like being locked out of their own back yard,” she added. “They don’t like when their family traditions are banned on the lands that they’ve been using, and that’s why they oppose the RMP.”
Last year, members of Congress did attempt to use the CRA to veto resource management plans for local BLM field offices. If Maloy or another Utah politician were to introduce a bill, it would be the first time it’s been used for a national monument.
Environmental advocates have vocally opposed the use of the CRA for those BLM field office plans, but they say that attacking Grand Staircase goes a step further. The BLM is required to manage its landscapes for multiple uses, balancing grazing, mining, and extraction with recreation, conservation, and wildlife habitat. Environmental groups argue that a national monument, though managed by the BLM, is not a multiple-use landscape, and that monuments are intended to prioritize conservation over extraction.
They also say Congress would be disregarding years of local input and cooperation from local communities, as well as tribes in the area who have lived in and interacted with the Grand Staircase-Escalante area since time immemorial.
“This plan reflects years of public input, scientific research, and meaningful Tribal consultation, and dismantling it through procedural shortcuts undermines good governance, responsible land stewardship, and the protection of irreplaceable cultural landscapes," Autumn Gillard wrote in a statement. Gillard is Southern Paiute, and the cultural resource manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. She’s also a member of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition.
The other tribes in the coalition are the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Zuni Tribe.
Steve Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said the prospect of overturning the plan creates uncertainty.
“It's going to be much harder for BLM to manage the Grand Staircase-Escalante as an intact landscape,” he said. “I think there's going to be a lot of confusion among the public and among ranchers and guides and outfitters and local governments about what can and can't happen in the monument.”
Bloch said he’s worried about that uncertainty leading to inadvertent damages to the sensitive desert landscape.
“Folks don't know where to drive, they don't know how to behave, they don't know what kind of activities they can do and where and when they can do them,” he said. “And when you're in a place like Grand Staircase-Escalante with these irreplaceable cultural sites, with the fossil resources, with the one of a kind plants and animals, that means there's real damage on the ground happening.”
If Congress did throw out the monument’s plan, the BLM would be barred from drafting a plan that is “substantially the same” as the 2025 plan. Bloch said it’s not even clear what a substantially different management plan for a national monument would look like.
“What we do know is that the public and stakeholders want certainty,” he said. “They want to know how to behave. They want to know the rules of the road for how you can act and behave in a place; if it's a national monument, if it's a BLM field office. Setting expectations for people matters. And that's all being cast aside by using this kind of sledgehammer (of the) Congressional Review Act.”
The Trump administration has signalled that it wants to rescind national monument status for several landscapes in the Western United States. Because Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, also in Southern Utah, had their boundaries shrunk during the president’s first term, public lands advocates suspect it’s a matter of when, not if they’re targeted again.
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
