One Vote Away
How Congress Is About to Hand Grand Staircase-Escalante to the Extractive Industries - Permanently
Here at Quislings, we’re outdoors people. One area we know well is Boulder, Utah - a town of fewer than 200 souls perched at the edge of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, one of the most spectacular stretches of wilderness in North America.
We also eat well when we’re there. The Hell’s Backbone Grill and the Sweetwater Kitchen are both destination restaurants - the kind of places that make you wonder how something this good ended up this far from anywhere. We know Blake Spalding and Jen Castle, who own Hell’s Backbone, and Brandie Hardman of Sweetwater. These are people whose livelihoods and identities are inseparable from the land that surrounds them.
Which is why what’s happening in Washington right now is personal.
The Inheritance
If you’ve ever talked with foreign visitors in an American national park, you’ve probably heard some version of the same thing: they can’t believe it exists.
The sheer scale of land set aside in perpetuity - not for industry, not for development, but for the public - is genuinely rare in the world.
Our national parks and monuments are an inheritance passed down through more than a century of political will, from Theodore Roosevelt’s Antiquities Act of 1906 through the present day. Most countries don’t have anything like it.
Under this administration, that inheritance is now for sale.
Consider the math: any revenue from selling federal land is minuscule against the national debt. But the land is gone forever - and the buyers are rarely strangers to power. Friends of politicians benefit; everyone else absorbs a permanent loss.
Think about what we lose - and who benefits.
Burgum, Lee, and the Scheme
Doug Burgum, Trump’s Interior Secretary, is supposed to manage federal lands in the public interest. Instead, his department has been caught ghostwriting talking points for Senator Mike Lee’s scheme to sell off up to 3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service land.
Internal emails obtained by High Country News and the Center for Western Priorities show Interior officials coordinating directly with Lee’s office - even as Burgum publicly claimed the administration wasn’t focused on land sales. Interior’s own five-year strategic plan lists “assess and right-size monuments” as a core goal.
(We’ve covered Mike Lee’s hypocrisy on the national debt in our last piece. Same senator, different racket.)
In mid-2025, Lee inserted an amendment into the Republican reconciliation bill mandating the sale of those 3 million acres, written so developers could select the parcels they wanted most. He pitched it as a solution to the West’s housing crisis. ProPublica and the Utah News Dispatch examined past land sales and found no evidence that’s true. The Senate parliamentarian killed the amendment on procedural grounds. Lee stood down but was explicit: “I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land.” By December he was back with a revised mandate, retreating only after hunting and recreation groups erupted.
Lee has received over $309,000 from oil and gas interests and $38,000 from mining and coal - more than $445,000 from the energy sector overall - according to OpenSecrets.
Maloy Goes Further
Representative Celeste Maloy, Utah’s 2nd District, has gone further still: she introduced legislation to repeal the section of the Antiquities Act that allows presidents to designate monuments in the first place. No authority, no future monuments. Ever.
Maloy sits on the House Committee on Natural Resources - jurisdiction over the very lands in question - and her donor list reflects it: $247,600 from Republican leadership PACs (Johnson, Scalise, Emmer, Stefanik), over $55,000 from oil and gas interests, and another $15,000 from mining. The leadership money keeps her in line; the industry money is her reward.
The Vote That Can't Be Undone
Maloy and Lee jointly invoked the Congressional Review Act in February 2026 to undo Biden’s management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante, specifically to reopen the monument to oil, gas, and mining and loosen grazing restrictions. Under the CRA’s fast-track rules, both chambers can pass it by simple majority - no filibuster, no extended debate. A floor vote could come at any time.
What makes S.J. Res. 109 particularly dangerous is that it doesn’t touch the monument’s boundaries. Grand Staircase-Escalante would still exist on paper. Lee and Maloy are too politically savvy to attempt outright abolition - three in four Utah voters oppose it. Instead, they’re using the CRA to kill the management plan that gives the monument its actual teeth: rules governing mineral leasing, grazing, wildlife, and public access. Strip those rules and the BLM reverts to its default “multiple use” mandate, which explicitly includes oil drilling, mining, and expanded grazing.
The CRA’s real venom is in the fine print: if the resolution passes and the President signs it, the BLM is permanently barred from issuing any “substantially similar” plan in the future. When Trump shrank the monument in 2017, Biden restored it with a stroke of the pen in 2021. The CRA route is specifically designed to close that door. Lee and Maloy aren’t just attacking the monument. They’re trying to make the attack permanent.
Leasing, Patents, and What “Sale” Actually Means
It helps to understand what “selling” actually means here, because two different mechanisms are in play:
The first is leasing: companies pay the government royalties to drill for oil or gas on federal land. The government retains title. The land may be industrialized and scarred, but it is still technically public.
The second is ownership transfer - and this is what Blake Spalding means when she tells us that once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. Under the 1872 Mining Law, a company that files a mineral claim on federal land and develops it can eventually purchase that land outright from the government - at prices set in 1872: $2.50 to $5.00 an acre. This is called a patent. The title transfers. The land leaves public hands permanently.
Congress has had a moratorium on issuing new mineral patents since 1994, so the final ownership step is currently frozen. But that moratorium lives in the annual appropriations bill and has to be renewed every year. Mike Lee's 2025 amendment proposed a third and more direct route: a congressional mandate to sell millions of acres outright, with developers choosing the parcels. Any of these paths - fail to renew the moratorium, lift it outright, or pass a direct sale - and the land leaves public hands permanently. Nothing comes back.
The stakes extend far beyond southern Utah.
REI - a retailer with 22 million members whose entire business depends on people having public land to recreate on - has put it plainly:
“If they prevail in using the CRA in this way, they can use it to attack protections for other public lands nationwide, weakening the foundation of conservation for America’s public lands.”
Grand Staircase-Escalante is the test case. Every other monument in the federal system is watching.
What Blake Spalding Found in Washington
All of this policy and procedure has a human face. It belongs to the people who actually live and work at the edge of the monument - the ones whose restaurants, livelihoods, and communities exist because the wilderness exists. One of them went to Washington to say so.
Blake Spalding traveled to Washington recently to make the case for the monument directly to Lee and Maloy. She came back with nothing. Both dismissed her.
Spalding is not a fringe activist. She has lived in Boulder for 27 years. Hell's Backbone Grill has been nominated for James Beard Awards three years running and generates over a million dollars in annual payroll - in a town of fewer than 200 people. The monument is the reason tourists come to Boulder at all. When Spalding argues that Grand Staircase is good for the local economy, she isn't speculating. She is the data.
She was shown the door.
That’s the quisling dynamic in miniature: representatives of a rural Utah district, funded by extractive industries and national party leadership, dismissing the lived experience of their own constituents in favor of an agenda set elsewhere. The wilderness that sustains Boulder’s economy is being traded for mineral leases and donor goodwill.
Our national parks and monuments belong to all of us. The people working to carve them up answer to a much smaller group.
If you believe our public land inheritance should stay intact, use your voice. Contact your representatives - and do it now, before S.J. Res. 109 comes to the floor. REI has a form for submitting your comments here:
https://www.rei.com/action/network/campaign/grand-staircase-escalante
Notes and Sources
1. The New Yorker: Kathryn Schulz, “Why Two Chefs in Small-Town Utah Are Battling President Trump,” October 1, 2018. The original profile of Blake Spalding, Jen Castle, and Hell’s Backbone Grill. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/why-two-chefs-in-small-town-utah-decided-to-sue-president-trump
2. High Country News / Center for Western Priorities: Interior Department crafted talking points for public lands sell-off agenda, April 2026. https://westernpriorities.org/2026/04/interior-helped-mike-lee-with-talking-points-for-public-land-sell-off/
3. Public Domain Media: Trump’s Interior Dept. Crafted Talking Points For Mike Lee’s Public Land Sell-Off Scheme. https://www.publicdomain.media/p/trump-interior-mike-lee-federal-land-sales
4. ProPublica: Mike Lee says selling public lands will solve the West’s housing crisis. Past sales show otherwise. https://www.propublica.org/article/utah-mike-lee-public-lands-sell-off
5. Utah News Dispatch: Maloy and Lee take steps to rewind Grand Staircase management plan, February 2026. https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/02/27/mike-lee-celeste-maloy-plan-to-undo-grand-staircase-management-plan/
6. Earthjustice: Senator Lee Formally Begins Process to Fast-Track Destruction of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, February 26, 2026. https://earthjustice.org/press/2026/senator-lee-formally-begins-process-to-fast-track-the-destruction-of-grand-staircase-escalante-national-monument-in-utah
7. ABC4 News: Rep. Celeste Maloy introduces resolution to reject Biden-era management plan of Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument. https://www.abc4.com/news/southern-utah/rep-celeste-maloy-resolution-grand-staircase-escalante-monument/
8. Center for Biological Diversity: Sen. Lee Declares War on National Parks With Land-Sale Amendment, December 2025. https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/sen-lee-declares-war-on-national-parks-with-land-sale-amendment-2025-12-18/
9. OpenSecrets: Sen. Mike Lee - energy and natural resources industry contributions (career total). https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/mike-lee/industries?cid=N00031696&cycle=2022
10. OpenSecrets: Rep. Celeste Maloy - top contributors, 2024 cycle. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/celeste-maloy/contributors?cid=N00052817&cycle=2024
11. Grand Canyon Trust: Utah voter poll, December 2024: 75% of Utah voters support national monument protections. https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/sites/default/files/resources/Utah-National-Monuments-Survey-December-2024.pdf
12. Salt Lake Tribune: Two small-town Utah chefs get third nomination for James Beard Award, February 2019. https://www.sltrib.com/artsliving/food/2019/02/28/two-small-town-utah-chefs/
13. U.S. Government Accountability Office: GAO Opinion B-337705, January 2026: Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan qualifies as a rule subject to the Congressional Review Act. https://www.gao.gov/products/b-337705
14. Congress.gov: S.J.Res.109 - 119th Congress: joint resolution of disapproval of the Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/109
15. REI: REI statement on S.J. Res. 109 and the CRA threat to national monuments. https://www.rei.com/newsroom
