# Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument The southern Utah monument [[Bill Clinton]] proclaimed in September 1996 — announced from the rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona, because the political reaction in Utah was expected to be severe enough to make an in-state announcement untenable. It was the designation that revived the [[Antiquities Act]] after a quarter-century of near-dormancy, and it has been contested continuously ever since. ## The boundary record | Date | President | Instrument | Acreage | |---|---|---|---| | Sep 1996 | [[Bill Clinton]] | Proclamation 6920 | ~1,700,000 | | Dec 4, 2017 | [[Donald Trump]] | Proclamation 9682 | ~1,003,863 (−47%) | | Oct 8, 2021 | [[Joe Biden]] | Proclamation 10286 | ~1,870,000 | | Jul 13, 2026 | [[Donald Trump]] | Proclamation 11044 | ~181,541 (−90%) | The 2026 proclamation retains the Canyons of the Escalante and Kaiparowits Horizon units and removes roughly 1.69 million acres. ## Coal The Kaiparowits Plateau holds one of the largest undeveloped coal deposits in the United States — the reason the 1996 designation was read on the right not as preservation but as a deliberate strike against a pending mine, and the reason the monument became the founding grievance of modern Utah public-lands politics. The 2017 and 2026 reductions both restored large portions of the Kaiparowits to mineral entry. The monument is also one of the most scientifically productive paleontological landscapes in North America; dozens of dinosaur species new to science have been described from rock exposed within the original boundaries. That record is what makes the 2026 proclamation's reasoning notable: it argues that sedimentary rock layers and landscape-scale features are too generic to qualify as "objects of historic or scientific interest" under the statute — a reading that would exclude the very deposits the monument is scientifically famous for. ## The management-plan fight After the 2021 restoration, [[Bureau of Land Management]] issued a new resource management plan in 2024. Utah's congressional delegation — Senator [[Mike Lee]] and Representative Celeste Maloy — attempted to void it through the [[Congressional Review Act]], on the contested theory that a BLM resource management plan is a "rule" subject to CRA disapproval. The effort **failed in June 2026** when the 60-legislative-day fast-track window closed without a Senate vote, leaving the resolution subject to a 60-vote threshold. Six southwestern tribes had formed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition in March 2026, modeled on the Bears Ears coalition, in response. The CRA route failing in June and the proclamation arriving in July is not a coincidence: when the legislative instrument stalled, the executive instrument — newly authorized by the May 2025 [[Office of Legal Counsel]] opinion — was used instead. --- *See also: [[Bears Ears National Monument]], [[Antiquities Act]], [[Antiquities Act Timeline]].* ## See also - [[Federal Land Management Crosswalk]] — the monument lever among the five that move federal land, or only appear to - [[Antiquities Act]] - [[Bears Ears National Monument]]