The West has grown tired of a familiar scene. A president stands before a dramatic landscape and, with the stroke of a pen, announces that millions of acres of land, and the lives wrapped up in them, have been placed beyond argument. The crowd applauds. The bureaucratic state gets to work. And the people who actually live there are told to take it as a compliment.
This is how Utah ended up with President Biden’s Resource Management Plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante.
And it’s why Utah’s congressional delegation is moving to overturn it.
Not because Utah hates beauty. Not because anyone is trying to bulldoze red rock cathedrals. And certainly not because Utahns have suddenly turned against conservation.
The truth is more uncomfortable than the professional environmental class cares to admit. And the truth is that Biden’s RMP is a land-use regime imposed from the top down, wrapped in the language of reverence for God’s creation, and insulated from any semblance of accountability to voters. It was a sweeping land-use regime finalized in the eleventh hour of a failed president, designed to govern nearly 1.9 million acres of southern Utah for generations to come.
The plan contained zero meaningful input from Utah’s leaders. It completely disregarded the economic concerns of rural communities and failed to meet the Antiquities Act’s most basic requirement. If this monument exists to protect specific objects of historic or scientific interest, as required by law, then the government should at least be able to clearly identify those objects. Ultimately, the plan is fundamentally incompatible with state and local goals for wildlife management and multiple use.
So, how did Utah end up in this situation?
In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton was seeking a win to boost his standing with environmentalists. Reports claim “administration staffers had been on the lookout for environmental victories they could achieve without congressional support. They’d considered making Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a monument but decided that the president could use his veto powers to stop destructive oil drilling in the refuge, so they targeted Utah instead.”
For Clinton, it was easy. No congressional approval, no public hearings, no sticky politics.
It was only fitting that he did not travel to Utah to announce the creation of a Utah monument. He announced it from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, as if the people most affected were an inconvenient detail.
The designation derailed major economic plans overnight, including coal development on the Kaiparowits Plateau that locals had been told would provide hundreds of jobs and billions in revenue, including funding tied directly to school trust lands.
It’s a story of how a law written for pottery shards became a weapon against the West. What was sold as emergency preservation became, in practice, executive zoning on a continental scale.
To see how far we’ve drifted, it helps to return to the statute’s original purpose. The Antiquities Act was enacted in 1906 to prevent the looting of prehistoric ruins and archaeological treasures.
Congress was explicit about the constraint. The president could reserve only “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
That phrase was key to the law’s passage, as members of Congress were openly worried about vast withdrawals of Western land. Early proposals imposed a strict 320-acre ceiling. The Senate later passed a bill allowing temporary withdrawals, but permanent reservations could not exceed 640 acres. The assumption was that these would be small designations.
During the House debate, Rep. John Lacey — Chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands — responded to an inquiry from Rep. John Stephens of Texas, who asked, “How much land will be taken off the market in the Western States by the passage of the bill?”
Lacey responded, “Not very much.”
He pointed to the language in the proposed legislation requiring that the amount of land reserved be “the smallest area necessary.”
This assurance mirrored that found in the House report on the bill, which explained that “the bill proposes to create small reservations reserving only so much land as may be absolutely necessary for the preservation of these interesting relics of prehistoric times.”
That was the promise. The reality is that in January 2025, the BLM finalized a new Resource Management Plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante, covering nearly 1.9 million acres.
Until recently, those negatively impacted by these decisions had little recourse. But that is changing. The Government Accountability Office has now concluded that the Grand Staircase Resource Management Plan qualifies as a “rule” under the Administrative Procedure Act and is therefore subject to the Congressional Review Act.
This matters enormously.
The GAO found the plan designates lands as available or unavailable for certain uses. It carries binding legal consequences. It is an agency statement of future effect.
In other words, it is a regulation.
And regulation ultimately belongs under congressional review.
Congress is not “leveraging an obscure law.” Congress is exercising its constitutional duty.
But we are already hearing the predictable smears that this is somehow an “assault on a national treasure.”
This is emotional blackmail masquerading as an argument. A cheap rhetorical trick, long mastered by environmentalists, to cloak every disputed land-use decision in the aura of Yosemite and then denounce dissenters as heretics.
To be clear, no one is voting to dynamite Bryce Canyon. No one is proposing to pave Zion. The question is whether a Biden-era management plan, issued without proper submission to Congress and loaded with restrictions that local communities will live under for generations, should be treated as untouchable.
To be clear, Grand Staircase-Escalante is worthy of protection. It’s one of the last places that still feels truly untouched by modern life. But its future cannot be dictated by distant officials who will never bear the costs of their decisions.
The Congressional Review Act exists for moments like this. When agencies impose rules with generational consequences without the consent of the American people or their representatives, Congress has the authority and the responsibility to review them and ensure that the people are not simply presented with a fait accompli.