In a meeting with a local government council on March 3, staffers for Rep. Mike Kennedy (R-Utah) said the congressman was in the process of using the little-known Congressional Review Act to throw out the resource management plan for Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah.
That meeting in Emery County took place the day before Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) introduced a resolution of disapproval to overturn the resource management plan for Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument.
Resource management plans outline management strategies, and determine what activities can and cannot take place on public lands. For national monuments like Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, most extractive activities like mining and drilling are prohibited, and special considerations are given to cultural and archaeological resources, as well as to conservation.
In January, the Government Accountability Office ruled that resource management plans could be considered agency “rules” under the Congressional Review Act, and therefore, could be overturned by a simple majority in the House and the Senate. Lee and Maloy have yet to receive a vote on the resolution of disapproval in either chamber.
Staffers Ron Dunn and HD Sanderson attended the March 3 meeting of Emery County’s Public Lands Council. Dunn is an outreach representative and Sanderson is Kennedy's district director. The council’s website describes its mission as “aggressively preserve the community heritage of Emery County by vigorously participating in and influencing all public land planning and decision-making processes on behalf of, and under authority of the Emery County Commission.”
Towards the end of the meeting, Dunn described the “fairly new process” of using the CRA to throw out Grand Staircase-Escalante’s resource management plan, and clarified that Grand Staircase was not in Kennedy’s district.
“But we're watching it very closely and we're finding out that folks in where we go out there are by and large supportive of this,” he said. “And by the nods of the head I'm seeing, I think we probably have some good support here in Emory County as well.”
He asked Sanderson whether the vote had already taken place, and Sanderson confirmed that it had not.
“The congressman is also in talks with San Juan County to do a similar CRA for Bear's Ears,” Sanderson said. “So potentially to roll back the size of the monument and, and shrink it down. Those are still in the early stages of those discussions, but it would be a similar process to what's happening to Grand Staircase right now.”
“Tough to pull off this year, probably, for Bears Ears,” added Dunn. “But if any of you have any other thoughts in your county about addressing such a problem, our office would be amenable to taking a look at that with you.”
As of publication, San Juan County officials have not yet responded to a request for comment.
Using the CRA to undo Grand Staircase-Escalante’s plan has already cast uncertainty on the monument’s future. When a rule is overturned with the CRA, it prevents the agency in question from issuing a rule that is “substantially similar” to the nullified rule. It’s not clear what it would look like to draft a new resource management plan that is not “substantially similar” to the current plan, which was finalized in 2025.
Rep. Maloy has said in statements that the monument would revert to its 2020 resource management plan, but it’s not clear that would be the case.
But using the CRA on Bears Ears’ resource management plan could raise entirely new questions about how public lands are managed.
Bears Ears was first designated as a national monument by President Obama in 2016, but its size was significantly reduced by President Trump in 2017. When it was restored to its original size in 2021 by President Biden, the Bears Ears Commission was also established, as part of a co-stewardship agreement between the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, and five tribal nations: the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.
The current resource management plan incorporates traditional and tribal ecological knowledge throughout, from its definitions of the natural environment to protocols for how to manage the harvest of native plants that are sacred to the tribes, and used for ceremonial use.
It’s not clear how using the CRA would impact the inter-governmental cooperative agreement that governs the monument’s management.
Rocky Mountain Community Radio spoke with Anthony Sanchez Jr. in February about Bears Ears’ resource management plan, shortly after the one-year anniversary of the plan’s finalization. Sanchez Jr. is the head councilman for the Zuni Tribal Council and the co-chair of the Bears Ears Commission.
He said it was important that the tribes were an integral part of creating the plan.
“That means tribal priorities are guiding how the monument is managed,” said Sanchez Jr. “And I think when we look at the first year (of the plan), it wasn't about checking boxes, it was about setting the conditions for long-term tribal-informed care of the landscape.”
Sanchez Jr. also spoke about the successes of the plan, including allowing for tribal access. He said the tribes had already had two groups of youth go out and experience Bears Ears.
“They loved it so much,” he said of the inaugural group. “They started advancing and getting more into the culture and learning about it. Now… some of them are supervisors, and now they're bringing in some of the youth that they think will be interested. So it's that cycle, like you're teaching it, but you're also having it in a modern way where they're learning it hands-on, in its actual form instead of reading it from a book.”
Rep. Kennedy’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
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.
