Southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is just slightly larger than the entire state of Delaware, encompassing five distinct life zones spanning colorful towering cliffs, winding canyons, arid deserts and alpine forests. For many Southern Nevadans, it also represents an escape with rushing waters, ancient petroglyphs and dinosaur fossils, just four hours away.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), tasked with overseeing this diverse swath of land since it was designated in 1996, approved an updated 362-page Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan in January 2025. It dictates anything from where off-road vehicles can drive to habitat preservation policies, and reflects several changes made since President Donald Trump reduced the monument’s boundaries by almost half in 2017, and after President Joe Biden restored its original borders in 2021.

With Trump back in office, the future of this management plan is in question. On March 4, U.S. Rep. Celeste Maloy and Sen. Mike Lee, both Republicans from Utah, introduced House Joint Resolution 151, which seeks to use the Congressional Review Act to scrap the management plan altogether in favor of a 2021 version authored under the first Trump administration. Nevada’s lone Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei is one of six co-sponsors.

If it passes a simple majority vote in Congress, it would mark the first time the Congressional Review Act has ever been used to overturn a national monument management plan, and the BLM would be prohibited from issuing another plan that’s “substantially the same” as their prior plans. The implications for Nevada—home to four national monuments—worry public land advocates like Friends of Nevada Wilderness executive director and former BLM employee Shaaron Netherton. 

“Utah parks and monuments are incredibly popular for Nevadans,” she says. “And if this is successful, what’s next? From there, any of our land use plans in Nevada could be overturned, including Basin and Range, Gold Butte, Avi Kwa Ame and Tule Springs [national monuments].”

Netherton, who calls the push a “ridiculous political ploy to undermine collaborative local planning,” adds that nixing the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan could eventually lead to repercussions for the Silver State’s vast public lands system—up to and including opening up more of it for industrial mining and even land sales. It could also stifle the state’s thriving outdoor tourism economy, she says.

“The plan answers a lot of important questions,” Netherton says. “What’s open for oil and gas? Where are the critical wildlife corridors? How do we manage recreation? Where do we put campsites? What are the guidelines for grazing?”

Netherton’s concerns about weakened land management are underscored by a February 2026 analysis from Prospect Partners that found that federal land agencies in Nevada lost 21% of their workforce in 2025 alone, including its last two Fish and Wildlife administrators. In total, the BLM reduced its total staff in Western states by 18%.

The 2025 management plan, which characterizes Grand Staircase-Escalante as a “living laboratory” due to the world-renowned fossil deposits found in its Kaiparowits Formation, was informed by feedback the BLM gathered through 34 public and stakeholder engagement meetings. 

Maloy believes that outreach wasn’t sufficient, noting in a March 4 press release that the new plan “was written without the people it affects most having any real seat at the table.”

“That’s not how land management should work. The 2021 plan was built with local communities, balanced conservation with access, and reflected the realities of life in Southern Utah. This resolution uses Congress’ constitutional responsibility to check executive overreach and returns management to a plan that actually listens to the people on the ground,” Maloy wrote.

Nathan Waggoner, owner of Escalante Canyon Outfitters in Escalante, Utah, begs to differ. He was one of many locals who participated in the public engagement process surrounding the new plan. 

“I was very concerned about making sure that recreation was well-managed here, and that it continued to allow us the freedoms that we have now,” Waggoner says. “We wanted the agency to not be limited to certain parts as local guides and outfitters, and that’s one of the things we fought for and got in this management plan.”

For 21 years, the Waggoner family has molded its business into a “one-stop destination” that now includes a retail shop, a restaurant, a seven-cabin lodge, campgrounds, showers and guided natural history and fly-fishing tours. The operation began with just Waggoner and his wife, Kristina, but now employs 36—reflective of a recent economic study from Headwaters Economics that found that the Grand Staircase-Escalante region’s population rose by 26% as jobs grew by 51% from 2001 to 2022. 

“Now, we’re just hoping that Congress doesn’t take all of our input and just throw it aside and make a decision for us up in Washington. We want to have a voice. We want to keep it free and accessible to everyone,” Waggoner says.

He notes that Nevada residents and tourists who visit by way of Las Vegas make up a huge portion of their clientele.

“Flights into Vegas can be a lot cheaper than they are in Salt Lake [City], and I would say for most of the people that I talk to, Vegas is their destination for launching into this region to enjoy these public lands,” Waggoner says. “We love to see them experiencing these wild places for the first time and realizing that they’re just scratching the surface. It’s why we keep doing this.”

Back in Nevada, where a February 2025 push to roll back the boundaries at Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in a rapid 15-day review by the Department of the Interior ultimately sputtered out, the threat to Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management plan serves as a reminder of what’s still at stake. 

Apart from Amodei—who, along with Maloy, co-sponsored a failed effort to end the presidential power to declare new national monuments or redraw boundaries for existing ones last year—the remainder of Nevada’s congressional delegation has been more amenable to public land preservation. (Amodei’s office did not respond to request for comment.)

“Using [the Congressional Review Act] to attack national monument resource management plans sets a dangerous precedent, and I don’t support using [the Congressional Review Act for this purpose,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto writes in an email to the Weekly. “Nevada’s treasured Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is too precious to be threatened by a simple partisan majority in the Senate.”

Steve Bloch, legal director for the conservation nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, has been busy collaborating with groups like Friends of Nevada Wilderness and others to help sound the alarm ahead of a potential vote, which must take place within 60 congressional session days of its introduction, or sometime in early to mid-June. 

“If Maloy, Lee and Republicans in Congress can undo protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the sky is really the limit for what they might move to next,” Bloch says. “We know that a part of their playbook is to degrade how federal lands are managed and make it easier for them to put it up for sale. So, this attack on the Grand Staircase is really a watershed moment, and we’re trying to move heaven and earth to hold the line here in Utah and defeat their resolutions in Congress.”

Click HERE to subscribe for free to the Weekly Fix, the digital edition of Las Vegas Weekly! Stay up to date with the latest on Las Vegas concerts, shows, restaurants, bars and more, sent directly to your inbox!