Years before she was elected to Congress, Rep. Celeste Maloy was on the board of directors for a nonprofit organization that Utah lawmakers gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to sue the federal government over control of public lands. The organization never filed a lawsuit or returned any of the money to the state.
According to a report by the website Public Domain, Maloy was on the board of directors for the Foundation for Integrated Resource Management (FIRM). Between 2016 and 2017, the Utah Legislature gave FIRM $400,000 to fund lawsuits challenging federal control of public lands.
FIRM never filed a lawsuit, which prompted the Campaign for Accountability to file ethics complaints with the Internal Revenue Service and the Utah Division of Consumer Protection in 2020.
Maloy’s office did not respond to requests for comment from Utah Political Watch. However, a spokesperson told Public Domain that Maloy was not affiliated with FIRM during the period when it received the initial funding from the state.
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Maloy joined the FIRM board of directors in 2018. Later that year, she helped FIRM launch a related entity, the Rural Policy and Public Lands Institute (RPPL) to “conduct research related to public lands” according to business records filed with the State of Utah. Updated business filings show Maloy later became RPPL’s president. RPPL was dissolved in 2023 after Maloy launched her bid for Congress.
In 2019, Maloy successfully lobbied Utah lawmakers to give RPPL $300,000 to “conduct high-quality research on issues relevant to rural policy and public lands research” and “training the next generation of rural policy experts through an active program of student development and training.”
There’s scant evidence of what RPPL accomplished after receiving funding from Utah lawmakers. In 2019, the group helped a coalition of local governments secure a $200,000 matching federal grant to diversify the coal industry in northwest Colorado and eastern Utah. That grant led to the publication of the “Coal Innovation Playbook” in 2022. That document is no longer available online, but archived copies are available via the Wayback Machine.
