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Mike Lee's resolution to erase the monument's management plan ran out the clock on June 11. The plan stands.
On January 6, 2025, the Bureau of Land Management finalized a management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. After holding more than 30 public meetings over nearly two years, BLM's plan formalized co-stewardship with six tribal nations and prioritized the conservation of all the things that make the Monument so unique and significant.
On March 4, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Representative Celeste Maloy (R-UT-02) filed twin resolutions to permanently destroy it.
Their tool was the Congressional Review Act. Passed in time, it would have barred BLM from ever writing anything "substantially the same." No future president could reverse it.
A Monument without a management plan doesn't get the job done. It's like trying to navigate this wild place without a map or compass.
The deck was stacked in their favor. Lee chairs Senate Energy and Natural Resources. He had the votes for a simple majority. He still could not get it across the floor in time.
On June 11, the clock ran out.
Mike Lee has been trying to unmake Grand Staircase-Escalante for most of his career. This year he got closer than he ever has, and still came up short.
In 2017, Trump cut the monument nearly in half. 862,000 acres, gone. Lee had been pushing this for years.
Biden restored the boundaries in 2021. BLM spent two-and-a-half years building a new plan with tribal nations, scientists, and the public. Over 6,800 comment letters. More than 30 public meetings. Signed January 6, 2025.
Lee went looking for a different door.
Last July, Maloy asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) whether the plan qualified as a "rule" under the CRA. No monument management plan had ever been classified that way.
On January 15, the GAO issued an opinion, siding with Maloy. Seven weeks later, the resolutions dropped.
Grand Staircase-Escalante extends across southern Utah. President Clinton designated it on September 18, 1996. Scientists have called it one of the most significant geological and paleontological landscapes in the world. Every acre outlined on this map was the target. All of it remains protected.
More than 20 dinosaur species new to science have been described from the Kaiparowits Formation. During the four years the land was open after Trump's reduction, no leasing or large-scale mining of any kind materialized. But the fossils are irreplaceable.
In July 2014, paleontologists found at least four Teratophoneus individuals buried together in a single bonebed. The 2021 peer-reviewed study suggested these tyrannosaurs may have been social animals. The fossils are here because the land is here.
Slot canyons carved over millions of years through Navajo sandstone. The 2025 management plan closed grazing in the Escalante Canyon riparian areas while leaving over 93% of the monument open to livestock grazing. The 2020 plan would have reopened it. Erasing the 2025 plan would have left no mechanism to protect this landscape. The plan survived.
126 feet of waterfall over 180-million-year-old sandstone. The 2025 plan closes grazing around Calf Creek. The 2020 plan would have reopened it. If you've hiked here, this is the "your backyard" moment that nearly slipped away.
Six tribal nations, working through the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, helped shape the 2025 management plan. The Hopi, Navajo Nation, Kaibab Paiute, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni. The co-stewardship provisions they formalized would have vanished with the plan. They remain in force.
The green boundary is the full 1.87-million-acre monument. The dashed red line is the 2017 Trump reduction. Had the CRA resolution passed, the management plan governing all of it would have disappeared, with nothing substantially similar allowed to replace it. The resolution failed. The plan holds.
The staff who work here call it the science monument. More than 20 dinosaur species new to science have come out of the Kaiparowits Formation alone. The oldest known tyrannosaur. An ankylosaur with pyramids of bone in its skull. A tyrannosaur relative that may have hunted in packs. The paleontologist who found it called the Monument a living laboratory.
700 significant fossil sites sit on the acres Trump cut in 2017. Had this resolution passed, casual fossil collection would have opened on much of that land.
The Kaiparowits and the canyons below it are the ancestral homelands of multiple Tribal Nations. Autumn Gillard of the Inter-Tribal Coalition has said that dismantling the plan through procedural shortcuts undermines the protection of irreplaceable cultural landscapes.
"Using the CRA is a blunt instrument. It removes the plan entirely, and cuts Tribes, local communities, and the public out of the process."
Autumn Gillard, Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition
The 2025 management plan covers all 1.87 million acres. It took two years to build. Six tribal nations helped shape it. It guides permittees and public use across the monument. It limits grazing in especially fragile places. It protects dark night skies. It prohibits chaining.
All of it would have disappeared if the resolution had passed. It didn't.
Two bulldozers. A 250- to 300-foot chain weighing several tons. They drive parallel, dragging the chain between them. Everything in its path is ripped from the ground. Pinon-juniper forests. Biological soil crusts. Archaeological sites.
The BLM's own planning documents acknowledge "the potential for irreversible impacts on resources, such as archaeological sites and artifacts and paleontological resources."
The 2020 plan permits it. The 2025 plan bans it. Had the resolution passed, the ban would have gone with it. The ban stands.
Because the 2020 plan was written for a 1-million-acre monument and the monument today is 1.87 million acres, roughly 870,000 acres would have had no governing framework at all and would no longer have been managed as a monument. No future president could have reversed it. No replacement plan could ever be "substantially the same." That is what the CRA was built to do. This time, it ran out of time.
Representative Maloy has argued that the 2025 plan hurts the local economy. The record says otherwise.
Tourism is 51 percent of private employment. The monument drew 936,000 visitors in 2024. Grazing's still permitted on 93 percent of it. Two hundred outdoor businesses, 44 local shops, and over 125 organizations opposed the resolution.
The people Mike Lee and Celeste Maloy claim to represent don't want this.
Grand Staircase would have been the eighth public lands rule killed with the Congressional Review Act in a single year. It would have been the first national monument. Instead, it became the first to stop the chain.
The pattern is the pattern. Find a settled protection. Get the GAO to call it a rule. Pass the resolution with a simple majority. Lock the door behind you. It only works if the Senate moves in time. This time it didn't.
The Congressional Review Act comes with a deadline. After an agency rule is submitted to Congress, the Senate has 60 session days to pass a disapproval resolution by simple majority. Miss that window, and the resolution loses its privileged fast-track status.
Lee introduced S.J.Res.109 on March 4. He chairs the committee. He had the votes for a simple majority. He still could not get it to the floor in time.
Thursday, June 11, was Day 60.
The fast track expired. Lee's resolution now needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and it doesn't have them. The House companion, H.J.Res.151, has nowhere left to go. The same public pressure that stalled Lee's public lands sell-off last June helped run out this clock too.
The monument's management plan stands.
The playbook ran out of time at step one. The plan was never erased.
This win belongs to the people who showed up. Over 125 organizations, 200 outdoor businesses, and tens of thousands of public comments made erasing Grand Staircase too costly to rush through before the clock expired. The pressure worked.
It isn't over. Grand Staircase and Bears Ears both remain under threat from the administration and from a Congress that has used the Congressional Review Act seven times this session to undo land protections. The next attempt is a matter of when, not if. Staying loud is how the monument stays standing.
Your script
Hi, my name is [your name] and I'm a constituent from [your city and state]. I'm calling about Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The attempt to erase its management plan through the Congressional Review Act has failed, and I want to make sure [Representative's name] keeps it that way.
Please continue to defend our national monuments, including Grand Staircase and Bears Ears, against any future effort to strip their protections. These 1.87 million acres belong to all of us.
Thank you.
Calls take less than two minutes. You don't need to be from Utah.
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They were counting on you being too tired to notice. They were wrong, the way they've been wrong every time the public shows up.
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