×
×
The Senate can't be trusted. We can win the fight in the House.
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 is the Congressional Review Act. Once it passes, BLM is permanently barred from writing anything "substantially the same." No future president can 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 is stacked in the Senate. Lee chairs Senate Energy and Natural Resources.
We can win this fight in the House.
Mike Lee has been trying to unmake Grand Staircase-Escalante for most of his career. He's just never had all the pieces in place until now.
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 is under threat.
More than 20 dinosaur species new to science have been described from the Kaiparowits Formation. Beneath the fossils sits a substantial coal deposit. 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 reopen it. Without the plan, there is no mechanism to protect this landscape.
126 feet of waterfall over 180-million-year-old sandstone. The 2025 plan closes grazing around Calf Creek. The 2020 plan reopens it. If you've hiked here, this is the "your backyard" moment.
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 vanish with the plan.
The green boundary is the full 1.87-million-acre monument. The dashed red line is the 2017 Trump reduction. If the CRA resolution passes, the management plan governing all of it disappears. Nothing substantially similar can ever replace it.
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. If this resolution passes, casual fossil collection opens 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. It protects dark night skies. It prohibits chaining.
All of it disappears if the resolution passes.
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. If the resolution passes, the ban goes with it.
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 no governing framework at all and would no longer be managed as a monument. No future president can reverse it. No replacement plan can ever be "substantially the same."
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 oppose the resolution.
The people Mike Lee and Celeste Maloy claim to represent don't want this.
Grand Staircase would be the eighth public lands rule killed with the Congressional Review Act in the past year. It would be the first national monument.
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.
The Senate is 53-47 and the math is tough to get 4 Republicans to do the right thing and vote no.
The House is different.
The Boundary Waters resolution passed by six votes. Lee's public lands sell-off hit a wall there last June. Representatives face their voters every two years. They have to answer for what they do.
H.J.Res.151 is awaiting action in the House, where it doesn't have to go through the regular procedure of a Committee Vote. Every time a rep has to explain to constituents why they'd permanently strip protections from a national monument, the vote gets harder.
Call your representative. Phone calls get logged and counted in ways emails don't. Use our Congressional Public Lands Scorecard to find your rep, see how they've voted, and get their office number.
Your script
Hi, my name is [your name] and I'm a constituent from [your city and state]. I'm calling to urge [Representative's name] to vote NO on House Joint Resolution 151, which would permanently destroy the management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
This resolution uses the Congressional Review Act to eliminate protections for 1.87 million acres and permanently bars a replacement plan. It sets a precedent that could be used against any national monument in the country.
Please vote NO on H.J.Res.151. Thank you.
Calls take less than two minutes. You don't need to be from Utah.
Silence is permission.
They're counting on you being too tired to notice. They've been wrong every time the public shows up.
Show up. We can win this.
We're tracking every vote and legal maneuver threatening America's public lands. Independent reporting. No ads. No paywalls.
Subscribe Free on Substack 25,000+ readers