Undoing Utah National Monument Protections Risks Legal Chaos (1)

Republicans have a clear path to open national monuments to mining and fossil fuels by tossing out Biden-era conservation plans, but legal analysts say such a move would risk legal chaos.

Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) is considering using the Congressional Review Act to toss out the Biden administration’s 2025 Bureau of Land Management plan for Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Maloy asked the Government Accountability Office last year whether the management plan is a “rule” that is subject to the CRA. The office responded in its report issued this month that the plan is a rule, and therefore, Congress can throw it out.

Congress over the last several months has passed resolutions under the CRA disapproving BLM management plans developed by the Biden administration for non-monument federal lands in Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. Prior to 2025, Congress had never overturned any land management plan using the CRA.

Using the CRA on a national monument is unprecedented, and a clear way to chip away at its protections, analysts say.

“This area is becoming a big mess, legally speaking,” said Deborah Sivas, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program at Stanford Law School. “The new and novel GAO opinion is plainly, in my view, an attempt to undermine the monument designation.”

Maloy hasn’t yet introduced a resolution of disapproval for the Grand Staircase-Escalante plan. Coal and other minerals are found within Grand Staircase-Escalante, which is prized for its grazing land, off-road vehicle use, canyoneering, and wildlife habitat.

President Donald Trump shrank Grand Staircase-Escalante and neighboring Bears Ears National Monument during his first term—moves reversed by President Joe Biden. The state of Utah and several counties filed suit to abolish both monuments.

‘Fundamentally Incompatible’

Opponents, including the Utah state government, say national monuments block recreational and industrial access to federal lands. Maloy said the Grand Staircase-Escalante plan, finalized in January 2025, is “fundamentally incompatible” with state and local goals for wildlife, grazing, recreation, and economic development.

“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,” Maloy said in a statement provided to Bloomberg Law.

But Congressional disapproval will leave “the monument without a management plan, raising a serious question of what BLM does next because the CRA permanently prohibits readoption of a plan of ‘substantially the same form’,” Sivas said.

The BLM declined to comment.

Management plans for monuments created under the Antiquities Act are different from the other disapproved public lands management plans because monuments are governed partly under presidential proclamation, which could lessen the overall impact of a disapproval resolution, said John Ruple, a research professor at the University of Utah College of Law.

The GAO called the Grand Staircase-Escalante plan a “hybrid regulatory instrument” because parts of the plan that implement the monument’s 1996 creation proclamation are not a “rule” subject to the CRA, but the rest of the plan is a rule Congress can throw out.

“Monument proclamations invariably say that lands and resources within the monument must be managed to protect the resources identified in the proclamation,” he said, adding that the National Conservation Lands Act also requires the Interior Department to manage monuments in a way that protects them.

“A CRA resolution of disapproval cannot change that legally binding direction,” Ruple said.

Using the CRA to toss out a management plan will impair responsible oversight of the monument’s resources, said Tom Delehanty, senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm.

“It’s absolutely an attack on national monuments,” he said. “The plan was created by local federal land managers with input from tribes, local communities, local governments, and the public writ large, so this use of the CRA is also an affront to everyone who worked for years to put the plan together.”

A ‘Blunt Instrument’

But the “hybrid” rule will make it difficult to determine what parts of the monument’s next management plan have to avoid being “substantially the same” compared to the Biden plan, said Andrew Mergen, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School.

“There is not much case law regarding what makes a rule ‘substantially the same,’” he said. Any future plan is going to have to include standards that will protect resources the monument was intended to safeguard.

“Will the Trump administration do that? That strikes me as the risk here,” he said.

Congress would also use a “blunt instrument” to disrupt a president’s intent for the monument and throw out years of public input and planning, Mergen said.

“It is deeply disrespectful of the public’s role and must be devastating to the public servants who work hard to make good judgments and incorporate and respond to public concerns,” he said, adding that what would come next is unclear.

Congressional disapproval will also cast further legal uncertainty over the monuments, the legitimacy of which is being challenged by Republican opponents in several high profile federal court cases.

Those include Ariz. State Legis. v. Biden before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in which the court will grapple with state lawmakers’ standing to challenge a national monument. Oral arguments are scheduled for Feb. 3.

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit is expected to rule in the coming months in Garfield County v. Biden, which challenges Grand Staircase-Escalante and neighboring Bears Ears national monuments.