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Utah Representative Celeste Maloy is considering using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to toss out the management plan for Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a move that legal analysts say would risk legal chaos on public lands. Maloy asked the Government Accountability Office last year whether the management plan is a “rule” that is subject to the CRA. The GAO responded in a report released this year that the plan is a rule, clearing the way for Congress to attempt to throw it out.
Congress had never overturned any land management plan using the CRA prior to 2025, and has now done so for locally-developed resource management plans for public lands in Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. Maloy's threat to use the CRA on a national monument management plan is unprecedented.
“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. Sivas noted that using the CRA will leave parts of the monument without a management plan, and raises a serious question of what happens next because the CRA permanently prohibits the BLM from adopting a plan of ‘substantially the same form.’
According to Andrew Mergen, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School, there is not much case law to determine what makes a rule substantially the same, which will make it difficult to develop a new management plan. “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,” said Mergen.
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The Trump administration is moving forward to sell millions of acres of our public lands under the guise of affordable housing. This is about oligarchy, and this is what it looks like.”
