House GOP Passes Budget Dismantling Public Land Protections, But Stops Short Of Sell-Off

U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) convinced Republicans to strip a federal land sell-off from the deal, but unprecedented attacks remain.

The exterior of the U.S. Capitol. Photo by David Iliff.

House Republicans voted Thursday morning to approve the budget reconciliation bill, after removing provisions for a major public land sell off that had created a broad uproar. 

But the bill, passed without a single Democratic vote, still contains several unprecedented measures to roll back public land protections, boost the pace of leasing for energy development, and sidestep key laws.

“Unfortunately, even without selling off public lands outright, this budget reconciliation proposal remains the most extreme legislative attack on public lands in our nation’s history,” Lydia Weiss, senior director for government relations at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement. “We call on Congress to reject this mass giveaway to powerful corporate interests.”

By far the most contentious element of the budget from a public lands perspective was an amendment put forth by Reps. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) and Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) mandating the sale or transfer of major blocks of public land in their states. The amendment, which the committee approved on May 6 at 11 p.m. after 13 hours of debate, would have required the Interior Department to divest of 11,500 acres in Utah and 500,000 acres in Nevada. 

Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) led the charge in lobbying for the land sale provisions to be stripped from the bill before agreeing to vote for it, according to reporting by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and The Nevada Independent. 

“This was my San Juan Hill,” he said in a statement following the vote, referring to the Spanish-American War battle in which Theordore Roosevelt led American troops to victory. “I do not support the widespread sale or transfer of public lands. Once the land is sold, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land. Public access, sportsmanship, grazing, tourism… our entire Montanan way of life is connected to our public lands.”

That Zinke acted as a firewall against mass-federal land sales is notable. As Interior Department chief during the first Trump administration, he spearheaded the dismantling of two national monuments in Utah — the largest-ever rollback of federal land protections — and played host to land-transfer advocates. 

Still, the budget bill retains broad attacks on public land protections and increased pace of industrial exploitation that had raised concerns from advocates well before the Maloy-Amodei amendment was introduced. 

As currently written, the bill mandates oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and reinstates cancelled mineral leases adjacent to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It strips funding from the Inflation Reduction Act for agencies including the National Park Service, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Forest Service. It slashes royalty rates that companies pay to extract coal, oil and gas from federal lands. And in several cases it curtails critics’ ability to challenge proposed changes in court, while giving lease applicants the ability to sue the federal government to speed up their projects. 

“This bill remains the most dangerous attack on public lands in a generation,” Katie Umekubo of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement. “It guts environmental safeguards, shuts out the public, and turns over millions of acres to drillers, miners, and loggers. Congress should reject this reckless blueprint for industrializing our most cherished places.”

The budget package will now head to the Senate for consideration, where the Montana delegation could again stymie any attempt to dispose of publicly owned land. Last month, 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.