 Will the sun set on the Monument’s hard-won 2025 Resource Management Plan? Photo provided by Jackie Grant, 2025. |
| In this briefing, I’ll update you on the latest trick that Utah’s delegation has pulled out of its sleeve to try to undermine the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The short version is that the Utah delegation has finally taken the plunge and used a law called the Congressional Review Act to try to get rid of the Monument’s 2025 Approved Resource Management Plan. Last week, I talked with Chris Clarke from 90 Miles from Needles: The Desert Protection Podcast about Utah’s plan and its implications. The episode goes live on Friday, March 6, 2026, and we might get a little spicy about this obscure, and until recently, little-used law. You might think that removing a Resource Management Plan sounds rather innocuous and boring, but it turns out that the way they are going about it has huge implications for both the Monument and many other public lands. By using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), Utah thinks that it will be able to prevent any similar plan from being enacted in the future because “CRA actions cannot be challenged in court,” and future plans would be disallowed if they were deemed to be substantially similar to the removed plan. The usual suspects, Senator Mike Lee and Representative Celeste Maloy, are responsible for this latest ploy to undermine the Monument. If their Joint Resolution on the 2025 Approved Resource Management Plan is approved, there will be ripple effects in two directions. The first direction of ripple effects will be in the local communities because management of the Monument will be disrupted and have negative effects on business owners and tourism. The Management Plan that the Senator and his colleagues are trying to remove directs how the public and local communities share a limited resource: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The 2025 Management Plan provides the structure that people need to use and visit the Monument while protecting it as described in the Presidential Proclamation that defines the Monument. Rescinding the 2025 Management Plan will lead to uncertainty about how the resources on the Monument should be preserved and sustained for multiple groups of people and the next generation of users, especially because the Utah delegation has not shown us a clear path as to what management guidelines would replace the existing 2025 Management Plan. They have referenced the previous plan from 2020, but that plan is specific to a much smaller Monument (apologies if you run into the paywall at E&E News). By using the Congressional Review Act to revise the management plan, Lee and Maloy are choosing to open a Pandora’s Box of consequences. The main problem that they are letting out of the box is a restriction on what future management plans might look like: future plans must not be “substantially similar” to any rescinded plan. Because we do not know what the future holds in terms of climate, industry demands, tourism trends, etc. it is extremely foolish to cut off management options by using the Congressional Review Act to amend the plan. The second direction of ripple effects will be at the national level because using the Congressional Review Act to rescind management plans opens a gigantic can of worms that spans many millions of acres of American public lands. A huge workload will be shifted to Congress if they decide to use this tool to amend management plans because they will have to review all of them every time they are amended. Management plans need to be updated on a regular basis to be effective. Furthermore, Congress does not have the time nor the expertise needed to create management plans that are adequate to address the complexities of public lands use in America. It seems like this move by the Utah delegation could lead to a situation where small, but privileged, special interest groups could have an undue influence on the management of our public lands. It is very apparent from Senator Lee’s actions over the last year that the he would like to sell America’s public lands to private interests, which means that rescinding the management plan might be part of a bigger scheme. What are we doing about this threat? Utah’s use of the Congressional Review Act to rescind the Resource Management Plan only requires a simple majority vote to rescind the plan. This means that the most effective course of action on our end is to educate legislators about the consequences of voting for the Joint Resolution introduced by Lee and Maloy. Researching the law and developing material translates into hours of labor followed by communicating with reporters, podcasters, legislators, and staffers. For example, last week I participated in a collaborative media briefing in partnership with local business owners, Tribal members, and another nonprofit, the Conservation Lands Foundation. We also are collaborating with other nonprofits to create social media content that attempts to make boring, complicated legal maneuvers at least vaguely interesting, which is a lot of work! What can you do? If you want to keep the Monument’s 2025 Plan alive, contact your members of Congress TODAY and ask them to vote no on the Joint Resolution by Lee and Maloy! A vote will be held less than 90 legislative days from now, and it is important for all legislators to know that what happens in Utah won’t stay in Utah if they vote in favor of Maloy and Lee’s Joint Resolution. Wrapping up, writer Morgan Sjogren does an excellent job of laying out how these actions against Grand Staircase-Escalante ripple out to places once thought sacrosanct, like the Grand Canyon, in her Substack article, “Don’t Let Utah Reps Slice Up a Geological Layer Cake.” Give it a read and enjoy the beautiful photos and tour through history. Thank you for sticking with me today, and let’s leave this update with some positive news from the Monument’s western neighbor: Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, where work on a proposed highway through Mojave Desert tortoise habitat has been halted by a Federal judge. We will be back to our regular content later this month. -Jackie |
