Utah’s congressional delegation will not be able to repeal the resource management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument with a simple majority in Congress.
Two months ago, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) introduced a “resolution of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act. The act allows a simple majority in both chambers of Congress to overturn agency rules. Federal regulators ruled in January that the monument’s guiding document could be considered a rule under the CRA.
However, the lawmakers had 60 days to get the resolution to the floor for a vote, and that deadline passed on Thursday, June 11. Now, any resolution to throw out the RMP would be subject to a 60-vote threshold in the Senate—a much harder threshold to clear in a divided Congress.
The RMP that Lee and Maloy were hoping to scrap was approved in 2025, just before Trump took office, and is the guiding document for management of the nearly 2 million acres in Southern Utah. The plan outlines where and what kind of recreation can take place, where grazing and shooting are allowed, and how to protect cultural and archaeological sites important to the six tribes that make up the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-tribal Coalition.
Lee and Maloy claimed that the plan did not represent the views of Utahns, though tribes have contested that characterization.
The Inter-tribal Coalition released a statement celebrating that a deadline for a vote had passed, noting that this would have been the first ever use of the CRA to overturn a national monument's resource management plan. They said that it could have had a chilling effect on tribal nations across the country hoping to have a say in national monuments on their ancestral lands.
“If critics believe parts of the Grand Staircase plan should be changed, they should say which parts and why,” wrote Erik Stanfield, an anthropologist with the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department. “They should make that case in public. They should not pretend the process never happened. They should not use an obscure Congressional procedure to erase years of work because the final compromise did not tilt far enough in their favor.”
Scott Braden, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, described Grand Staircase as a beloved landscape, and said the public wants to see it protected.
“When people understood what was at stake and what was happening, people were upset and they were more than happy to contact their members of Congress, and this was happening across the nation,” he said. “So the reason that we stopped this and the clock ran out is because there wasn’t the political will to bring it forward for a vote.”
One of the stipulations of overturning an agency rule with the CRA is that the agency would be barred from approving another policy that is “substantially similar” to the scrapped rule. It’s not clear what that would have looked like for a resource management plan for a national monument, designed to protect and conserve vulnerable landscapes.
That uncertainty was particularly concerning for Braden.
“What it probably would have done is created a lot of fighting and uncertainty, and that's bad for everybody, no matter where you fall,” he said. “Supporting more grazing or less grazing, more off-road vehicle access or less: stability is important. That’s what would have gone out this window if this thing had passed.”
Lee’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Last summer, Lee included a proposal in the federal reconciliation package that would have sold off millions of acres of BLM and Forest Service lands to build housing, and he recently sponsored an amendment to a wildfire mitigation bill that would repeal the 2001 Roadless Rule. Braden said this track record demonstrates a sustained opposition to public lands.
“It's deeply unpopular,” he said. “So I hope that by being rebuffed again by people across this country, that this just shines a light on how unpopular Senator Mike Lee's public lands selloff agenda really is.”
According to the 2026 Conservation in the West poll, 91% of Western voters say they want to maintain some level of protections for national monument designations. 86% of Utah voters supported national monument designations.
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.
