When the last issue of Redrock Wilderness (Summer 2025) was published, we were in the thick of a fight to keep a public lands sell-off proposal out of Congress’s 2025 Budget Bill. Pushed by Utah’s own Senator Mike Lee under the guise of affordable housing, the various iterations of the proposal were extraordinarily unpopular and denounced across the political spectrum.
After many rounds of back-and-forth and amid some drama with the Senate Parliamentarian, Senator Lee admitted defeat and withdrew his proposal. The collective outrage from people across the country convinced four Republican senators (Jim Risch and Mike Crapo of Idaho, Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy of Montana) to buck the party and threaten to vote no if necessary. In a moment where every vote counted, Senator Lee knew he was out of luck.
Just a few days later, Congress passed the 2025 Budget Bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). While it fortunately did not contain provisions enacting the outright sale of public lands, the legislation still guts tax credits for clean energy, undermines the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and creates new handouts to extractive industries—all of which will threaten wild public lands for decades to come. We’re already starting to see the ramifications of this singularly awful bill. In just a few short months, oil and gas leasing has increased (see page 13), and the Trump administration has announced it is making millions of acres of public land available for coal leasing.
Congressional Rollback of Resource Management Plans
Not content with just interfering in public land management through bad budget legislation, Republicans in Congress tapped an obscure law known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to further hamstring land management agencies. In a first, they used the CRA to invalidate three recently completed Resource Management Plans (RMPs) in Montana, Alaska, and North Dakota. Prior to this, the CRA had largely been confined to rules or regulations finalized by a federal agency under a previous administration.
RMPs were not viewed as rules or regulations until this current Congress. They are essentially blueprints that guide how the Bureau of Land Managment (BLM) manages public lands within a specific area, including where activities such as oil and gas leasing, mining, off-road vehicle (ORV) travel, conservation, and various forms of recreation are prioritized. These behemoth documents, covering hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands, often take years to create, with many opportunities for public input and compromise.
Congress’s unorthodox use of the CRA has raised big concerns among western elected officials, conservationists, hunters and anglers, and even regulated industry across the nation. It has also raised lots of questions, such as: what rules will govern after a land management plan has been disapproved and how will the BLM issue a new plan for that area? People have theories about how to answer these questions but we’re truly in uncharted waters.
SUWA’s staff in Washington, DC worked with our partners to try to convince the handful of moderate Republicans in Congress that undoing RMPs is a terrible idea and can lead to real mischief in how our public lands are managed. Unfortunately, our warning fell on deaf ears. The votes in Congress to disapprove of these three plans fell neatly along party lines.
Since the initial three RMPs were invalidated, similar “resolutions of disapproval” have been introduced for plans in Northeast Wyoming and Western Alaska. We’re keeping an anxious eye out for a resolution targeting redrock country.
New Legislation from Utah Senators Mike Lee & John Curtis
While the government is shut down (as of press time) and thousands of federal workers are furloughed, Utah’s senators have kept themselves busy by introducing more anti-public lands legislation. Senior senator and longtime public lands adversary Mike Lee introduced the Border Lands Conservation Act, which would undermine the Wilderness Act and effectively hand over all public lands within 100 miles of either U.S. border to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a domestic surveillance zone. Specifically, the bill would amend the Wilderness Act to allow the DHS to use motorized vehicles and to construct new roads, physical barriers/fences, towers, and other infrastructure (remote video surveillance, motion sensors) within designated wilderness areas.
To make matters worse, the language of the bill would apply to any wilderness area so long as the DHS asserted that their activity was related to the broad, vague, and undefined purpose of “securing” either border. It also removes any and all ability for land management agencies to limit U.S. Border Patrol activities on all public lands within 100 miles of either border.
Joining Senator Lee on four other public lands-related bills is Utah’s junior senator and former representative, John Curtis. First up is the Brian Head Town Land Conveyance Act, which directs the Secretary of Agriculture to convey approximately 24 acres of public land within the Dixie National Forest to the Town of Brian Head, Utah, at no cost. The bill authorizes the town to use the land for a public works facility or other municipal purposes as determined by local officials.
The Brian Head bill represents a concerning precedent for federal land management. Most public land transfers require financial compensation or land exchanges of equivalent value to ensure that taxpayers are not subsidizing local or private interests; this legislation grants federal land for free. There’s no requirement for public notice or consultation, denying nearby residents, recreation users, and Tribal Nations the opportunity to weigh in. Additionally, there’s no environmental or economic assessment to evaluate how development on the 24-acre parcel could affect wildlife habitat, recreation access, wildfire risk, or forest management.
Second is the deceptively-named Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act. The bill exploits Americans with disabilities to push a radical motorized recreation agenda—one where public lands are blanketed in ORV routes and land managers have no discretion to limit motorized use to protect resources or balance competing uses. To be clear, it is not the disability community advocating for this bill, it is the off-roading groups. Importantly, there are already provisions in federal law that enable people with disabilities to access public lands with power-driven mobility devices. This legislation is nothing more than an attempt to significantly expand destructive motorized use under the guise of disability access.
SUWA worked with disability and conservation groups to respond to the legislation, which garnered media attention with this powerful quote from Syren Nagakyrie, Founder and Director of Disabled Hikers: “The Americans with Disabilities Act is landmark civil rights legislation that disability rights activists fought for decades to achieve, and the principles of which Senator Lee has repeatedly voted against. In contrast, it appears that the ‘Outdoor Americans with Disabilities Act’ does not have input from the broader disability community and prioritizes one type of access at the expense of all others. It is shameful that he would so blatantly use the disability community in his ongoing attempts to dismantle public lands, build and prioritize roads, and sell lands to the highest bidder. People with disabilities are not political pawns to be used while catering to special interests.”
Senators Lee and Curtis are also sponsoring two new bills that would open national parks to ORVs, fundamentally altering the visitor experience and damaging landscapes that draw millions of visitors each year. They’re called, respectively, the State Motor Vehicle Laws in National Park System Units Act and the OHVs in Capitol Reef National Park Act.
The State Motor Vehicle Laws in National Park System Units Act would open National Park Service roads to ORVs nationwide, including “street-legal” all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) on paved roads, and dirt bikes, ATVs, and side-by-sides (UTVs) on dirt roads and trails. Currently, nearly all National Park Service units prohibit ORVs, with only a few exceptions permitted by specific legislation for some National Recreation Areas, National Seashores, and National Lakeshores.
The OHVs in Capitol Reef National Park Act would authorize ORV use on a dozen paved and dirt roads in Capitol Reef National Park (the term OHV, or off-highway vehicle, is synonymous with ORV). These routes are currently closed to such use to protect specific cultural and natural resources as well as the visitor experience. Opening any Park Service paved or dirt roads to ORV use would directly contradict National Park Service staff expertise and on-the-ground knowledge, which makes clear that such a decision would cause irreversible damage.
Collectively, these final three bills are intended to prioritize motorized recreation at the expense of natural and cultural resources as well as other public lands users. Utah’s congressional delegation is driven by an extreme and out-of-touch vision for public lands, where wild places are turned into motorized playgrounds, motorized recreation is viewed as the highest and best use of our shared heritage, and the value of public land is defined by how many places you can drive your ORV.
Government Shutdown
At the time of publication, the federal government is shut down—sadly, we’ve been through this before and know the dramatic impacts it will have on the already beleaguered and decimated federal workforce (who have been threatened with additional reductions in force), as well as on the public lands themselves. Prior shutdowns have resulted in countless incidents of intentional damage to public lands (including illegal ORV use) and vandalism. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is using the shutdown to push forward an “energy dominance” agenda (approving more fossil fuel and mining projects) while nonessential staff are furloughed.
Right now is a scary time for the redrock and public lands, with more attacks sure to be coming from Congress. It’s more critical than ever that we build congressional support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act (ARRWA), which is both our vision for protected public lands in southern Utah and a key source of political power. You can find a current list of ARRWA cosponsors on page 9; if your elected officials aren’t on it, please urge them to become cosponsors. In this time of powerful new coalitions and a rapidly changing political landscape, don’t underestimate the importance of contacting your elected officials and speaking up for the redrock!
—Steve Bloch, Laura Peterson, & Neal Clark
The above article first appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of our Redrock Wilderness newsletter. Become a member to receive our print newsletter in your mailbox 3 times a year.
