Is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument a test case in a new strategy to undo national monument protections across the country?
After a relatively quiet 2025, new threats to the Colorado Plateau’s beloved national monuments are taking shape. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is the first to be targeted, but not in the way you might expect.
This time, rather than slashing the monument’s boundaries, anti-monument politicians in Washington D.C. are readying an obscure congressional procedure to try to invalidate Grand Staircase-Escalante’s strong and protective management plan. If they succeed, other national monuments and even national parks could be at risk.
Without conservation-oriented management plans, parks and monuments would lose critical day-to-day protections that preserve the important values and resources for which they were created. These plans help protect wildlife, native plants, biological soil crusts, cultural and archaeological places, and prevent overcrowding at campsites.
Members of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition have called on Congress to stop this attack.
Tell your members of Congress to vote “no” on any joint resolution to tear down Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan today. Take action now
What is the Congressional Review Act?
The law the Utah congressional delegation may use is called the Congressional Review Act. It allows Congress to reverse “rules” is disagrees with by a simple majority vote in both chambers.
Until 2025, Congress had never considered Bureau of Land Management resource management plans to be “rules” subject to repeal. But so far, the 119th Congress has used the Congressional Review Act to overturn four such plans by very slim majorities. Now Grand Staircase-Escalante could be next.
A new strategy to attack national monuments
If this test of a new strategy is carried to its terrible end, it could be the first blow of a one-two punch in which the second punch eliminates the monument’s boundaries and abolishes Grand Staircase-Escalante entirely. All the first punch takes is a short joint resolution. Such a resolution only requires a simple majority in favor to get rid of the monument’s management plan. We expect the joint resolution to be introduced soon, and votes could come soon after.
Slim majorities are important here. Just a handful of votes in the U.S. House can stop this and keep Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan in place. Although almost all republicans and some democrats have voted to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the other four plans in this session of Congress, those plans all covered so-called “multiple-use lands.” National monuments are not multiple-use lands. National monuments were designated to elevate conservation over other extractive and consumptive multiple uses.
Worse still, once something is reversed by the Congressional Review Act, any future plan that is “substantially the same” is prohibited. This action would be direction from Congress that land managers can never write another protective management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante again.
If this effort is successful against Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan, Congress could employ this tactic against other national monuments, potentially upending public lands protection as we know it.
How did we get here?
You may recall that in late 2017, President Trump signed proclamations unlawfully slashing the size of Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by just under half. This unpopular action was met with worldwide condemnation, and President Biden restored both monuments’ boundaries in October 2021.
On Interior Secretary Burgum’s first day in office in February 2025, he issued an order calling on agency staff to revisit monument designations and outline steps to revise national monuments. That review was never made public. But in April 2025, the Washington Post reported that six monuments could be on the chopping block, including Grand Staircase-Escalante, Bears Ears, and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni on the Colorado Plateau.
What do “We the People” think?
National monuments are exceptionally popular.
Seventy-one percent of Utah voters support keeping Bears Ears and 74% support keeping Grand Staircase-Escalante as national monuments.
In Arizona, 80% of voters support keeping Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni as a national monument.
In November 2025, nationwide polling found that 77% of voters, regardless of political affiliation, support the ability of presidents to designate national monuments.
A quiet plan to attack national monuments
Perhaps because Americans love them so much, the administration went quiet on monument reduction after spring 2025. But behind the scenes, anti-monument Utah politicians were hatching plans to get rid of protections for national monuments in another way.
In July 2025, Rep. Celeste Maloy, (R-UT), asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to issue an opinion saying that the 2025 Grand Staircase-Escalante plan was indeed a “rule” under the Congressional Review Act. On January 15, 2026, the GAO issued an opinion saying just that.
A ticking clock to defend Grand Staircase-Escalante
That GAO opinion will be entered into the congressional record. Once that happens, a short and simple “joint resolution of disapproval” can be quickly introduced and voted on by the House and Senate. It only needs a majority in the House and 51 votes to pass in the Senate. Because party margins are slim in the House and larger in the Senate, we must win this vote in the House.
The next few weeks are critical to protecting Grand Staircase-Escalante, and there is hope. Democrats who voted to overturn other management plans and republicans in the nascent Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus might be persuaded to keep the monument intact.
During a floor speech before he voted to overturn a mining ban near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area using the Congressional Review Act on January 20, 2025, the Public Lands Caucus’ co-chair Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-MT, said “when a mine is not located in the wilderness, it’s not located in the buffer, it’s located in a Forest Service holding, which by nature, which by law, is multiple use…mining is an appropriate use.”
Remind your House representative that national monuments are not “multiple use” lands. Urge them to vote “no” on any joint resolution of disapproval of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan.
Do it now. They need to hear from you today.
