A plan to sell up to 3 million acres of public land in the western United States has ignited a firestorm of public opposition in the conservation community with everyone from the Sportsmen's Alliance to the Wilderness Society calling on the Senate to strip it from the federal budget bill.
Now, the Senate's Energy and Natural Resource Committee—chaired by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah—has reportedly added vast swaths of eligible land to the controversial sell-off provision, bringing the total number of lands at risk up to more than 250 million acres, according to a recent analysis performed by the Wilderness Society.
The news comes on the heels of another sell-off provision in the House version of the budget bill. That amendment would have sold around half-a-million acres of public land in Utah and Nevada, but it was scrapped after a broad coalition of public-land advocates rose up in opposition. The Senate's version was added to the budget bill late on the night of June 11. As initially crafted, it mandated the sale of up 3.2 million acres of public land—somewhere between .5 and .75 of 1 percent of all BLM and USFS lands in 11 western states.
The Senate’s Energy and Natural Resource Committee made its latest tweak to their version of the sell-off provision over the weekend, according to the Utah News Dispatch. It could lead to the following expansions of public-land selloffs:
Taking Utah as an example, the original provision opened about 1.9 million acres of federal lands to potentially sell off, the Dispatch reports, but the change expands that number to 18.7 million acres.
In Alaska, the total has grown to more than 82 million acres.
In Colorado, the total numbers of acres at risk of sale is now 14,352,632.
In Nevada, it's up to 33.5 million.
In Wyoming, there are nearly 14.5 million identified acres that would be eligible for sale under Mike Lee's current proposal.
The grand total, according to The Wilderness Society, has reached a staggering 258,673,128.
“It effectively doubled the acreage that could be on the table for sale," says Michael Carroll, Bureau of Land Management Program Director for The Wilderness Society told the outlet. "That has serious ramifications in Utah. Ranchers and recreation communities are really going to be the big losers of this legislation.”
It does so by altering previous language that exempted public lands with “valid existing rights.” That previous exemption included land with mining claims, oil and gas leases, and grazing permits. While the Committee indicates that oil and gas leases and existing mining claims are still valid, with the latest change, they determined that grazing leases do not rise to the same standard and are therefore eligible for sale or disposal in the budget bill. A spokesperson for the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources confirmed the changes, according to the Dispatch.
“Public lands eligible for sale in the bill encompass over 250 million acres including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors,” The Wilderness Society wrote in its most recent press release. “The bill directs what is likely the largest single sale of national public lands in modern history to help cut taxes for the richest people in the country. It trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected.”
National Monuments Are Also At Risk
Sen. Mike Lee has publicly claimed that certain protected areas like National Monuments and Wilderness Areas would not be impacted by his sell-off provision. In a June 16 post on X, for example, he wrote that “the legislation specifically exempts National Parks, National Monuments, Wilderness Areas, National Recreation Areas, and eleven other categories of federally protected land from sales to build much-needed housing for American families.” It's worth noting that X's Community Notes feature (the social media site's in-house fact checking mechanism) says "the Senator is incorrect" and includes a hyperlink that leads to a Wilderness Society map that Field & Stream has previously reported on.
According to David Willms, the Associate Vice President of the National Wildlife Federation and the host of the Your Mountain Podcast, a recent memo from the the Department of Justice could indeed lead to the sale of lands designated as National Monuments if the Senate’s sell-off provision passes intact.
“We now have a DOJ that says that the President has the authority to rescind or greatly reduce the size of National Monuments that have been established by his predecessors,” Willms tells F&S. “If this bill passes, then 6 months later the President revokes the designation of a National Monument that is on BLM or Forest Service lands, some of those lands—maybe all of those lands—could be on the auction block.”
Willms says that congressionally-designated public lands like National Parks are likely to remain protected, but lands designated as a National Monument under the 119-year old Antiquities Act could be threatened if Mike Lee's sell-off provision passes. “You don’t have to look very far back into the President’s first administration to see that he tried to significantly reduce the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante [in Utah],” says Willms. “Based on that, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Sen. Lee’s amendment will pass and then all of the sudden his exemption for National Monuments will no longer apply.”
Anyone concerned about the potential sale of America's public lands in the budget reconciliation bill is being urged to contact their Senators. The Capitol Switchboard phone number is 202-224-2131.
