Utah Senator Resurrects Federal Land Sell-Off. This Time It’s A Fire Sale.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s contribution to the GOP’s “big, beautiful” budget bill would auction off up to 3.2 million acres of the public domain.
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most radically anti-federal land lawmakers to ever walk the halls of Congress, moved late Wednesday to force the sale of as much as 3.2 million acres of public land in 11 western states.
The proposal, part of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s contribution to the GOP’s massive budget bill, is all but guaranteed to ignite a firestorm among public land advocates across the West. The total acreage Lee wants to put on the auction block comes close to what former Republican Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz proposed selling off back in 2017 — a short-lived effort that ended with Chaffetz pulling the bill in response to public backlash from his constituents.
In a video announcing the bill’s text, Lee, who chairs the powerful Senate committee, bemoaned that the federal government owns one-third of all acres in the U.S.
“In states like Utah, it’s even more extreme,” Lee says in the video. “Almost 70 percent of our land is controlled by Washington, D.C. That’s not sustainable. It’s not fair. It’s not serving the Americans that actually live here.”
Lee added that the provision opens “underused federal land to expand housing, support local development and get Washington, D.C. out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow,” without impacting coveted hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation areas.
“Washington has proven time and again it can’t manage this land,” he said. “This bill puts it in better hands.”
The bill mandates the Departments of Interior and Agriculture to sell off between 0.5 percent and 0.75 percent of the total land held by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service — a combined figure that ranges from 2.19 million acres on the low end to 3.26 million acres. The bill concentrates those land sales in 11 Western states, including Utah, Nevada and Alaska, and excludes federally protected lands like national parks, wilderness areas and national wildlife refuges.
The bill’s convoluted wording caused confusion about whether those limitations could drive down the total impacted acreage, leading to wildly varied estimates over how much land Lee aimed to sell off. But the bill flatly directs the BLM and Forest Service to offload between 0.5 and 0.75 percent of its total holdings.
Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
“Time and time again, Westerners have made it crystal clear that they want to keep public lands in public hands,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement. “Clearly Senator Lee isn’t listening.”
While Lee largely framed the provision as a solution to America’s housing crunch, an accompanying summary of the bill notes that the sales would be for “housing, increased timber sales, geothermal leasing, and compensation of states and localities for the cost of wind and solar projects on federal land.” The legislation would provide the secretaries of Interior and Agriculture $5 million each to carry out the land sales.
Notably, the provision exempts Montana from any future land disposals. Montana Republicans in Congress have repeatedly said they oppose the sale and transfer of federal public lands. In April, Montana’s two Republican senators — Tim Sheehy and Steve Daines — joined Democrats in voting for a failed amendment that would have blocked federal lands from being sold off to reduce the federal deficit. Daines told E&E News last week he was working with Lee to “narrow” the scope of any proposed federal land sales.
Even with the Montana carveout, Lee’s proposal is likely to put Daines and Sheehy in a precarious position.
“Senator Daines is against the sale of public lands and is making his strong concerns clear to his colleagues,” a spokesperson for the senator told Outdoor Life on Wednesday.
Lee’s proposal comes three weeks after the House of Representatives backed away from a similar attempt to offload more than 500,000 acres of federal public land in Nevada and Utah. House Republicans abandoned that effort, which drew widespread backlash, after Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) refused to vote for the budget draft unless the land transfers were removed.