In an unprecedented move, Utah’s congressional delegation has introduced a resolution to throw out the resource management plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The Government Accountability Office determined in January that the resource management plan qualifies as a “rule” under the Congressional Review Act. Now, Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy (both Republicans) have introduced a “resolution of disapproval” for the plan. That means it would only take a simple majority in the House and the Senate to toss the plan.
“Congress does not surrender its oversight responsibility simply because an agency labels something a ‘plan’ rather than a ‘rule,’” Lee wrote in a statement. “The GAO has now confirmed what the law makes clear: this Resource Management Plan is a rule. It carries binding consequences. It shapes what can and cannot occur across millions of acres. Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress has the right to review it.”
The first Trump administration shrunk the boundaries of the 1.9 million-acre monument in southern Utah in 2017, and finalized a resource management plan for the smaller landscape in 2020. When the Biden administration restored Grand Staircase to its original size in 2021, it had to draft a new management plan to fit those boundaries. That resource management plan—currently in question under the CRA—was finalized in January 2025.
Rep. Maloy wrote in a press release that this 2025 plan did not adequately give southern Utah communities a seat at the table.
“That's not how land management should work,” she said. “The 2020 plan was built with local communities, balanced conservation with access, and reflected the realities of life in southern Utah. This resolution uses Congress's constitutional responsibility to check executive overreach and returns management to a plan that actually listens to the people on the ground. And to be clear: this land remains federal land. It remains protected. What changes is that the communities who live here get their voice back."
The BLM lists several southern Utah towns and counties as cooperating agencies during its multi-year process, including Escalante, Kanab, as well as Kane and Garfield counties.
“I think there's confusion,” said Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Sometimes if you don't get everything you want, you say, ‘we weren't heard.’ And that's obviously not the case. And when you look at the plan, it reflects deep public involvement from local residents, local counties, state government.”
Data from Headwaters Economics shows that many rural communities—including those in southern Utah—benefit from national monuments and the tourism they bring.
Tribal nations that have called the Grand Staircase-Escalante landscape home since time immemorial were also cooperating agencies to the management plan, and have expressed disapproval over its potential invalidation.
“Utahns include Tribal Nations,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa, a member of the Navajo Nation, in a statement. “We are part of this state’s history, present, and future. Undermining Tribal collaboration undercuts trust, weakens public land management, and threatens the integrity of monuments nationwide.”
“True leadership would strengthen government-to-government relationships, not disregard them.”
In the short-term, advocates worry that undoing the plan would cause confusion about what can and cannot happen on the landscape.
“If you don't know where to take your vehicle, if you don't know how to behave when you interact with fossil resources or these sacred sites and cultural resources that are found in the monument, when these things are damaged or destroyed, they're gone forever,” Bloch said. “Missteps have real consequences on the ground.”
In the long-term, SUWA and others worry that the fragile Colorado Plateau landscape could be opened up to activities that have a greater impact, like off-road vehicle use and extraction.
Bloch also noted that the state of Utah is actively engaged in litigation to undo the monument, and that Lee and Maloy have track records
“These are the members of Utah’s delegation who brought us the sell-off initiative last year,” he said, referring to Lee and Maloy’s respective efforts to sell off large swaths of U.S. Forest Service and BLM lands. “They oppose the very concept of federal public lands.”
He said using the blunt tool of the CRA would weaken the nation’s federal land management system as a whole.
“Why would BLM or Forest Service or (National) Park Service go through all the work to prepare a management plan if Congress can simply undo it?” he asked.
Bloch also said this is part of a broader effort by the state of Utah and the Trump administration to undermine federal public lands.
“That's everything from reducing the workforce, underfunding these federal land management agencies, now seeking to undo their management plans and prevent these agencies from having similar plans in the future, selling off federal lands,” he said.
He said members of Congress should be on alert that this could happen in anyone’s district, especially lawmakers like Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-Colo), whose Western Slope district is home to Canyons of the Ancients, Dinosaur, and the Colorado National Monument.
“We know what happens in Utah doesn't stay in Utah,” he said. “It's not hard to imagine a place like Canyons of the Ancients being next in line for assault. And so it's important to draw a line in the sand to say, ‘we're not going to stand by and allow this to happen to our national monuments.’”
Polling data from Colorado College shows that undoing national monument designations is unpopular with voters in the West. The 2026 survey found that 91% of voters across eight Western states said that national monument designations should be kept in place, including 86% of Utah voters.
In addition, 75% of voters across the eight states surveyed said they were opposed to Congress overriding local resource management plans to increase mining and oil and gas development
on national public lands.
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.
