Trump’s Interior Dept. Crafted Talking Points For Mike Lee’s Public Land Sell-Off Scheme
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said a federal land sell-off “wasn’t part of the president’s agenda" even though his staff shared research with the Utah senator.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s committee consulted with the Trump administration the day before Lee introduced his wildly unpopular bill to force a sell-off of up to 3.2 million acres of federal public lands across the West, Public Domain has learned.
Internal emails show that President Donald Trump’s Interior Department shared research with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Lee chairs, and helped craft talking points that Lee used to pitch his controversial proposal.
Lee introduced his measure in June as an amendment to Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” budget bill and pitched it as a common-sense solution to America’s housing crunch. Many treated Lee as a lone actor pushing an extremist public lands privatization agenda, though the Trump administration launched a task force months earlier to study selling off as much as 400,000 acres of federal land for housing development.
As public backlash to Lee’s proposal reached a boiling point, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum attempted to distance the Trump administration from Lee’s effort.
“I don’t think anybody is really spending much time thinking about it up there,” Burgum told Scripps News in front of the White House in late June, adding that “it doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill because that wasn’t part of the president’s agenda to be part of the bill in the first place.”
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), a former Trump Interior secretary who was widely credited with helping block a House effort to sell off federal lands weeks prior, applauded Burgum’s comments in a June 27 post to X, writing “the great Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says public land sales are not part of the Trump agenda.”
But two weeks earlier, Burgum’s team provided Lee’s committee with technical data about the impact of his proposal and offered feedback that Lee ultimately used to downplay the significance of his proposal.
On June 10, Chris Prandoni, Lee’s legislative assistant on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, emailed two Interior staffers with draft language for their review.
“This is the quote I’ve been working up with your guys to accurately reflect your research: ‘The Department of the Interior estimates that the Bureau of Land Management has about 1.2 million acres of land within 1 mile of a population city center and another 800,000 acres within 1-5 miles of a population center. Much of this land may qualify for disposal under this section,’” Prandonic wrote. “We also are going to dedicate five percent of the revenue to maintenance backlog.”
The subject of the email — “[EXTERNAL] DRAFT / PRE-DECISIONAL RE: land disposal for housing--new question” — suggests Interior’s engagement with Lee’s staff went beyond what is detailed in the exchange.
Greg Wischer, a former critical minerals consultant who was tapped last year to serve as Interior’s deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, signed off on the quote later that evening.
“Good to go on the quoted content. Thanks for running it by us!” Wischer wrote.
That talking point appeared verbatim at the top of an FAQ that Lee released the following day alongside his public land sell-off proposal.
In that same email chain, Jeremy Arendt, Interior’s deputy assistant secretary of natural resources and infrastructure, encouraged Lee’s’ staff to “include a % of total acres this represents for BLM, which is about 0.7% of the total, or about 30% of lands within 5 miles of population centers.”
The committee’s FAQ dismissed the idea that the proposal is “a massive sell-off of federal land,” noting that it “requires disposal of only 0.5%-0.75% of the [Bureau of Land Management] and [Forest Service] estates. It leaves the remaining 99.25% untouched.”
The communications also indicate that several Interior employees were scheduled to meet with Lee’s staff on June 11, the day Lee unveiled his proposal.
“Thanks, guys. See some of you all tomorrow,” Prandoni wrote after Wischer approved the draft quote.
“Thanks Chris, looking forward to it!” replied Matt Schafle, a former National Rifle Association employee and current congressional and legislative affairs director at Interior.
The Wilderness Society, an environmental organization, obtained the emails through a public records request related to the Trump administration’s housing task force and shared them with Public Domain.
Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, said the documents “paint a troubling picture.”
“Rather than engaging the public or pursuing real housing solutions, the administration appears to have spent that time coordinating messaging with the same members of Congress who pushed large-scale public land sell-offs last summer,” he said in an email. “That’s not problem-solving — it’s laying the political groundwork to sell off America’s public lands.”
The Interior Department and a spokesperson for Lee’s committee both characterized the internal conversation as routine.
“The Bureau of Land Management has, for decades, used Congress’s existing land‑disposal authorities to address local needs—including creating opportunities for affordable housing—through a careful, public process that includes land‑use planning, environmental review, and appraisal,” an Interior spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “Providing routine, factual briefings to Congress about how these long‑standing authorities work is standard, non‑partisan practice and does not indicate support for any particular legislation.”
“Committees regularly seek input from subject-matter experts across the executive branch to ensure proposals are informed by existing law, program experience, and a clear understanding of potential impacts,” a spokesperson for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee wrote in an email. “President Trump has consistently supported using underutilized federal land for housing, including pledging in Nevada to open new tracts for large-scale development and directing the Departments of the Interior and Housing and Urban Development to stand up a joint task force to identify suitable federal lands for housing.”
Neither the Interior Department nor Lee’s committee responded to questions about the meeting referenced in the emails.
“This shows Doug Burgum’s top people were literally writing talking points for Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off America’s public lands,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group, said in an email after reviewing the documents. “This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Burgum has been clear that he only sees our lands as dollars on a balance sheet, not a promise to be kept for future generations. The fish rots from the head, and these emails make it crystal clear: Doug Burgum is only here to degrade, exploit, and eventually sell off America’s public lands. Our parks and park rangers deserve so much better.”
Interior was also in touch with the American Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank that advocates for selling federal lands to private sector developers, the emails show.
In May, Ed Pinto, a senior fellow and co-director of the housing center at AEI, sent Interior officials AEI’s analysis of Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) and Celeste Maloy’s (R-Utah) amendment to the House’s sweeping budget bill to sell off thousands of acres of federal public lands in their states for home development. AEI found that selling off 544,000 acres of BLM land in Nevada and Utah “could yield $100 billion for the U.S. Treasury” over the next ten years and emphasized that the House amendment “could be the first step toward further BLM land release in nine other Western states (AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NM, OR, UT, and WY).”
Ryan Hofmann, an advisor at the Interior Department, thanked Pinto for sending the document.
“This analysis is very helpful to have on hand, going forward,” Hofmann wrote.
In the months since the GOP’s failed public land sell-off attempt, the Interior Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have said little about their own push to privatize federal acres.
The joint task force, which launched in March, was charged with identifying “underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development.” The memorandum that Burgum and HUD Secretary Scott Turner signed gave the two agencies until April 15 — last year or this year, it did not say which — to submit a report to the White House’s National Economic Council “detailing the number of land parcels identified, the number of housing units developed, infrastructure progress, and any policy recommendations for improving the program.”
Asked for an update on the administrative effort, an Interior spokesperson said it would share information “once the interagency process concludes and any materials become publicly releasable.”
Disclosure: Public Domain has received funding support from The Wilderness Society.
More reading:
Gotta like, "The fish rots from the head" ...plenty 'rotting heads' out there.