A beloved national monument is under threat from Utah Republicans. Activists are calling to save the ‘crown jewel’

A beloved destination for more than 900,000 visitors each year, the Grand-Staircase-Escalante National Monument stretches across more than 1.8. million pristine acres of Southern Utah’s wilderness.

With ties to six Native American tribes, the stunning landscape of slot canyons and desert is home to more than 600 species of bees and fossils have been uncovered from at least 15 dinosaur species found nowhere else on Earth.

Now, Republicans in the Southwest state are taking action that environmentalists warn could harm the monument and its inhabitants.

The politicians are considering overturning the monument’s Biden-era management plan – which helps protect the land – by leveraging the Congressional Review Act.

“This is a direct assault by Utah politicians on one of the crown jewels of America’s system of federal public lands,” Steve Bloch, legal director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.

“Any attempt to leverage this obscure federal law against the monument is an effort to thwart the will of millions of Americans who have repeatedly stood up in support of Grand Staircase-Escalante, its wild red rock landscape and its irreplaceable cultural and fossil resources,” he added.

A 30-year-old law

The Congressional Review Act is a 1996 law that lets Congress overturn certain federal agency actions. It’s the same law that Republicans are using to open up the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota for mining, reversing a decades-long ban.

Utah’s federal delegation is expected to introduce a bill under the act after an opinion from the Government Accountability Office said that Congress can undo the management plan following a July 2025 letter from Congresswoman Celeste Maloy.

Maloy previously pushed to sell thousands of Bureau of Land Management land in southwestern Utah that she said could be used for water infrastructure and affordable housing, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

Maloy told The Independent in an email on Friday that she had always been clear in her opposition to the management plan and that her position was never a secret.

“Local governments, trail users, agricultural producers, and rural communities across southern Utah have all spoken out against a plan that locks up land and ignores how these lands are actually used,” she wrote. “The Biden-era RMP is fundamentally incompatible with state and local goals for wildlife management, grazing, recreation and economic development.”

The congresswoman noted that asking federal agencies to respect congressional oversight is routine, and that she does not send out a press release every time she speaks with a government agency.

“I am working to return the monument’s management plan to its previous framework, one that balances conservation with access and reflects the needs and voices of the people who live and work on this land,” said Maloy.

Republican criticism

The congresswoman is a part of Utah’s federal delegation, which has previously been critical of the monument’s management plan.

“The Bureau of Land Management’s plan ignores Utah voices, limits access to grazing and recreation and disregards the economic impacts that this decision will have on local communities,” the delegation wrote in January 2025. “The administration has also failed to provide a complete inventory of the objects it wishes to protect, a requirement of the Antiquities Act.”

“We will continue to fight to return our land to local control and against future federal overreach,” the delegation promised.

The Montana-based research institute Headwaters Economics recently found that national monument designations do not disrupt local economies.

For people living around Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, earnings per job have increased more than 25 percent since the monument’s designation in 1996.

“The communities in Garfield and Kane counties, Utah, that neighbor the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument grew after the designation of the monument, continuing previous growth trends,” the institute said.

Nothing new

This isn’t the first time the monument has been under threat.

During President Trump’s first term, the administration nearly cut the monument in half, opening the rest to drilling and mining.

Former President Joe Biden restored the original borders. Since then, House Republicans have pushed to fund only half of the acreage.

“Utah politicians are at it again, doing whatever they can to erode protections for our public lands,” Tom Delehanty, senior attorney at Earthjustice, said.