Millions acres of public land could be eligible for sale in Senate reconciliation bill

More than 250 million acres of public lands fit the criteria for sale put forward by Sen. Mike Lee in the newest version of the reconciliation bill, according to a new report by The Wilderness Society, a conservation advocacy group.

While the Utah Republican’s version of the bill caps the total sell-off to a vanishingly small percentage of America’s 640 million acres of public land — between 0.5% and 0.75% of all Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands, separately — it would translate to the federal government selling up to 3.04 million acres.

The intention of the sale is to drive revenue in order to offset trillions of dollars in proposed tax cuts and address the nation’s $36 trillion debt.

Lee explained in a video address published June 11 that, “we’re opening underused federal land to expand housing, support local development and get Washington, D.C., out of the way for communities that are just trying to grow.”

Rather than identifying specific parcels like a previous iteration that attempted to sell public lands in President Donald Trump’s bill, no explicit locations are detailed. The Senate’s approach creates a broad yet specific set of criteria for what might be eligible for sale should the recommendation be signed into law.

Then, from what lands meet those requirements, “an interested party” has the ability to nominate specific parcels they’re interested in to the Interior Department or Agriculture Department for sale approval. The bill does, however, make clear that state and local municipalities will have first right of refusal on any land sale.

By looking at existing BLM and Forest Service maps, The Wilderness Society was able to determine the massive scale and range of the public lands that actually meet the criteria of the bill.

In response to the report, a spokesperson from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee wrote in a statement that the map published by the “left-wing Wilderness Society” is “flat-out misleading.”

“Chairman Lee’s bill does not list a single acre ‘for sale.’ Instead, the bill creates a nomination process for certain federal lands — allowing communities to propose parcels for potential sale only if they meet strict criteria and meet consultation requirements.”

Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director at The Wilderness Society, said that “when we saw the revised language and actually started to put cursor to map and saw ... that 258 million acres across the West are on the table for sell-off, that was shocking to all of us.”

What is included in the bill?

Land from 11 states are included in the potential sell-off: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. Within those states, the bill explicitly excludes federally protected public land such as national parks and monuments, recreation areas, conservation areas and historic sites among others.

“The Energy and Natural Resources Committee is working on changes to further limit eligible lands to those U.S. Forest Service lands within two miles of a population center and Bureau of Land Management lands within five miles of a population center,” wrote the spokesperson. Those changes are not yet reflected in the bill’s language, and therefore not in The Wilderness Society’s report.

The bill criteria also excludes lands that were subject to “valid existing rights,” like oil and gas leases, or mining claims. Those existing rights included grazing permits but language was later added carving out an exemption for them too, which nearly doubled the total scale of lands eligible.

Addressing the inclusion of land with grazing rights, the spokesperson from the Senate committee wrote that “the updated text from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee makes clear that grazing uses will be protected and supported under the proposal.”

Alaska has the largest volume of land that can be considered — over 82 million acres — but within Utah, there is quite a lot of potential land, too. Approximately 18.7 million acres of land meets the Senate’s sale criteria. It is a figure very similar to the 18.5 million acres (an area roughly the same size as South Carolina) that the state sued the federal government for last year in a case that the Supreme court declined to hear this past January, suggesting the state try it in a lower court.

After that ruling, Lee told the Deseret News that “there’re plenty of legislative pathways” for Utah to acquire ownership of the federal land within its borders. “A lot of which I’m already working on to try to transition at least some federal land to state, local, and — in some cases — even individual control,” he said.

The bill also stipulates that the full 0.5-0.75% of public lands must be sold within five years, though there are restrictions that would force the sales to begin soon after the bill is signed.

The secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture would have 30 days to solicit nominations from “an interested party,” an unrestricted category, from which the eligible lands should be sold. Then every 60 days, they have to publish lists of land for sale until the full percentage has been sold off.

“If it passed on July 4,” Carroll said, “that means that by the time school starts, you’re gonna have public lands being sold off across the country.”

What is the backstory?

The potential public land sale represents the newest iteration of a continuing debate over who should own public lands. It started nearly 250 years ago at the second Continental Congress, when the expansive territories to the west were given, rather than held by the states with holdover-rights from England, to the fledgling federal government. The conflict flared up during the Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then came to another inflection point last year when Utah sued the federal government for ownership of federal public land within its boundaries.

Some Republicans in both the Senate and the House, see selling public lands as a good way to help achieve those goals. Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, and Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., first added public land sales in the House’s version of the “big, beautiful bill” introduced last month, ultimately getting stripped by a bipartisan group of legislators.

That effort was led by Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, who was Trump’s former Interior secretary. “It’s a no now. It will be a no later. It will be a no forever,” he told The Associated Press about selling federal public land.

A bad precedent?

The Wilderness Society had its maps viewed around 300,000 times in the first days of publishing the reports and the Utah Public Lands Alliance president, Loren Campbell, even wrote in a post assessing the bill that, “We have all seen the flood of social posts about the impact of the Lee Amendment to the Budget Reconciliation Bill.”

Campbell did a thorough review of the bill’s implications and history, but made sure to reiterate that the bill is not yet in its final form and there will be opportunity to comment or make changes. The UPLA will be making its own formal recommendations, he wrote.

No matter what happens, however, Carroll finds the effort and conversation worrying.

“Putting a land-sale package into a budget reconciliation bill that establishes the precedent of paying for giant tax cuts by selling off federal public lands is deeply concerning,” Carroll said. “Look to communities. They’re going to have their favorite mountain bike areas, their favorite open space or their favorite recreation areas sold out from under (them). I think it’s cold comfort to have Sen. Lee say, ‘Oh, it’s only three million acres, right?’”

He added that, “the vagueness of all this — what they’re doing is essentially an exercise in identifying lands that could potentially be sold off, and they’re telegraphing that to every would-be buyer across the West."