Mike Lee is Targeting a National Monument in Utah

Utah’s Mike Lee has teamed up with Utah House Rep. Celeste Malloy in an attempt to dismantle protections for the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in the southern part of the Beehive State. This BLM-managed property is popular with hunters and anglers because it prioritizes conservation and recreational use over commercial extraction activities like coal mining. Lee and Malloy are attempting to remove those safeguards using the controversial Congressional Review Act (CRA).

If the CRA sounds familiar, it’s because Rep. Pete Stauber of Minnesota recently used it to remove a mining moratorium on a portion of the Superior National Forest that directly borders and flows into the famed Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It has been a common legislative maneuver over the last year as Congress works to overturn public-land protections that were put in place by land management agencies with collaborative input from local user groups and the broader public. The CRA is a filibuster-proof technique that allows Congress to scrap protections with a simple-majority of votes in the House and Senate. Until recently, it had never been used to rescind duly implemented public land safeguards.

Local Impacts

Nate Waggoner is the owner of Escalante Outfitters in the remote town of Escalante, Utah, on the edge of the monument. In addition to his food and lodging business, Waggoner takes clients into Grand Staircase in pursuit of brown and cutthroat trout. He also guides the monument’s high-mountain lakes for tiger and brook trout. “It’s an incredible fishery,” Wagonner tells F&S. “We fish slot-canyon type spring creeks with slick-rock bottoms for these amazing holdout strains of Colorado cutthroat.”

A Colorado cutthroat caught in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the widespread introductions of non-native salmonids over the last century have served to limit the native fish’s habitat to isolated headwater streams and lakes. They are now a species of concern in some states.

Like others who hunt and fish in Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, Waggoner is deeply concerned about Lee’s push to scrap the area’s hard-won National Monument designation. “What this does is, it completely scraps our management plan, which we’ve worked so hard to implement here on the local level,” he says. “Our management plan is the foundation for everything that happens on Grand Staircase.”

The entire monument is open to hunting and fishing, Wagonner says, and 90 percent of it is open to public grazing. The monument designation does set boundaries around cattle grazing near stream banks, and it strictly prohibits all forms of commercial mineral and energy extraction.

Management Plan Protections

When it comes to hunting, Waggoner says Grand Staircase’s management plan provides crucial habitat protections for elk, mule deer, big horn sheep, and pronghorn antelope. “There is a critical migration corridor for mule deer running through the monument,” he adds. “It’s used by the Paunsaugent herd which is one of the best mule deer herds in the West.”

A muley buck taken on BLM land in Utah. (Photo Courtesy of the BLM)

It’s not the first time that supporters of the area’s National Monument designation have been on the defensive. During President Trump’s first term, then Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke managed to shrink the boundaries of GSENM by nearly 50 percent. That move was rescinded under Biden, and the monument was restored to its current 1.9 million-acre footprint.

Sen. Lee’s current challenge to Grand Staircase’s National Monument status goes far beyond that. It would erase the monument designation (first implemented in 1996) altogether, and with zero public input. It was also prohibit the Bureau of Land Management from reinstating the area’s monument designation during a future presidential administration—not unlike Lee’s current push to repeal the Roadless Rule via the Wildlife Prevention Act.

Read Next: Mike Lee Amendment Would Erase Roadless Rule Protections Nationwide

Due to CRA rules, Lee only has 60 days from the resolution’s introduction to push this across the finish line in the Senate. Since today—June 11, 2026—is day 60, all eyes are on Lee to bring this before a full-Senate vote in the coming hours. If Lee misses the deadline, he’ll have to file a different CRA resolution during a future session of Congress.

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