This Utah Congresswoman Is Waging War On ‘Government Waste.’ She Oversaw A Nonprofit Accused Of Misusing Taxpayer Funds.
Rep. Celeste Maloy served on the board of a Utah group that received $400,000 in state funds to sue the feds — and never delivered.
Few members of Congress have embraced the Department of Government Efficiency's purported war on government waste more enthusiastically than Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah). A member of the newly formed Congressional DOGE Caucus, she is on a mission to rein in what she calls “out of control government spending” and says it’s time for federal agencies to “do less with less.” She’s described 2025 “a unique opportunity to roll back crushing regulations and make our government smaller and more accountable to the American people."
But years before her political ascent, Maloy helped direct a rightwing nonprofit that hoovered up hundreds of thousands of state taxpayer dollars to sue the federal government over land use policies without following through, according to records reviewed by Public Domain. The group does not appear to have returned any of the money, despite calls for it to do so.
Prior to being elected to Congress in 2023, Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) spent years in the trenches of Utah’s war against restrictive federal land policies. A relative of anti-government extremist Nevada ranchers Cliven and Ammon Bundy, Maloy is a former public lands attorney for the Utah Association of Counties and has said she’d “love to see the state have jurisdiction over [public lands] someday.”
In Washington D.C., Maloy has continued to carry that torch. She endorsed Utah’s lawsuit seeking to force the federal government to turn over millions of acres of federal lands in the state and introduced legislation to overturn a Biden administration-era rule meant to balance conservation with extractive development on Bureau of Land Management lands.
Organized in 2014, the Foundation for Integrated Resource Management, or FIRM, was part of a web of nonprofits, law firms and other entities that Utah lawmakers have funneled money to in recent years as part of a broad campaign to wrest control of public lands from the federal government. In 2016, the Utah legislature gave FIRM $250,000 specifically to “fund legal challenges to federal government restrictions on public land,” the Salt Lake Tribune previously reported. Lawmakers funneled another $150,000 to FIRM the following year. Among other things, FIRM had publicized its plans to sue over the Obama administration’s 2016 designation of Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah.
Four years after receiving its first legislative appropriation, FIRM still hadn’t filed a lawsuit, prompting the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog, to file ethics complaints in June 2020 asking the IRS, the Utah Division of Consumer Protection and Utah’s state auditor to investigate whether FIRM had violated state and federal law. The watchdog group accused FIRM of not only misusing taxpayer money by failing to abide by the terms of its contracts, but underreporting its revenue in financial disclosures to the IRS.
“Organizations like FIRM that abuse the public trust must be held accountable,” Daniel Stevens, then the executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, said in a statement at the time.
When the Salt Lake Tribune contacted FIRM President Stan Summers about the ethics complaints in 2020, he said that President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 meant the nonprofit no longer needed to take legal action against the federal government. Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration drastically shrank the boundaries of Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
“After Bears Ears, there wasn’t a reason to sue so we switched away from litigation,” Summers told the Tribune. “We switched the arena to help with education.”
FIRM should have returned the funds if that was the case, Stevens argued at the time. “The state wanted FIRM to file lawsuits. They didn’t do it,” he told the Tribune. “There are better uses of this money than giving it to FIRM’s executives and lobbyists
While the ethics complaints against FIRM garnered media attention, Maloy’s tenure on the group’s board appears to have gone unnoticed. Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group, alerted Public Domain to Maloy’s ties to what it described as “a grift that cost Utah taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Now she's attacking the Antiquities Act again, working to undermine protections for our most special public lands and allow a select few to profit,” Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, wrote in an email to Public Domain, referring to a bill Maloy introduced earlier this year to strip presidents of their authority to designate national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906 and instead hand that power to Congress.
Maloy joined FIRM’s board of directors in 2018, according to IRS filings. She also served as board chair of the Rural Policy And Public Lands Institute, a separate research and education organization that FIRM launched in 2018. The following year, Maloy and RPPL lobbied for and received $300,000 from the Utah legislature, promising to be “a resource” for the legislature, counties and anyone else writing statutes and creating policy.
Maloy’s office told Public Domain that she was not at FIRM when it received the state grants and that her tenure as an unpaid volunteer lasted only a few months.
“During that time, FIRM focused on educating policy makers, which is in line with the contract with the state,” her office said in an email statement. “It is her understanding that whatever funds were not used for the intended purposes were returned to the state after she left FIRM’s board.”
There is no record of FIRM returning money, according to Public Domain’s review of the nonprofit’s financial reports to the state. The Campaign for Accountability said the IRS and Utah officials never responded to its complaints.
But a week after the Salt Lake Tribune ran its article in 2020, then-Utah State Auditor John Dougall asked a staffer, Jeremy Walker, to look into FIRM, according to internal emails that Accountable.US obtained through a state public records request in 2021 and shared with Public Domain. After reviewing FIRM’s contracts and financial statements, Walker made the case that FIRM should have reimbursed the state.
“I reviewed the financial reports for 2016-2018. There were only about $40,000 in legal fees paid by FIRM,” Walker wrote to Dougall in mid-July 2020. “I don't really know what else FIRM did since the Trump Administration kind of resolved the issue before it got into the courts. I would think that the funds should have been returned to the State.”
Walker added that the issue “boils down to how you interpret the scope language” of the contracts. He offered to seek out a legal opinion. The documents Accountable.US obtained did not include any such legal opinion or an official request from FIRM to amend its scope of work, as the initial contracts stipulated if such a change were to occur.
Dougall, who has described FIRM’s former president Stan Summers as “a friend” and opposes federal control of lands within Utah’s border, did not run for reelection as state auditor in 2024.
Rahn Rampton, a spokesperson for newly elected Utah State Auditor Tina Cannon, told Public Domain that the auditor’s office never received a formal request to audit FIRM and could find no legal opinion stemming from Walker’s initial inquiry. He directed Public Domain to FIRM’s annual financial statements, the last of which, in 2019, notes that the nonprofit had spent all of the $400,000 in taxpayer funding it received.
“Their last report submission fulfilled their statutory requirement,” Rampton wrote in an email.
Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, which issued the contracts to FIRM and has spearheaded a taxpayer-funded campaign to promote the state’s high-profile federal land grab lawsuit, did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment.
FIRM and its Rural Policy And Public Lands Institute were both administratively dissolved sometime in 2023, according to records.
At a town hall last week in Salt Lake City, Maloy, who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, fielded questions from a boisterous crowd of Utahns, many of whom voiced anger about the current Republican effort to slash federal spending.
“We are not going to get out of the situation we are in financially without all of us feeling some pain,” Maloy said, drawing loud boos.