The Trump Team Is Still Eyeing Hundreds Of Thousands Acres Of Public Land For Housing

Will the administration’s ongoing push to open federal lands for housing development face the same public backlash that Sen. Mike Lee triggered?

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s recent attempt to sell off millions of acres of federal public land under the guise of combatting America’s housing crunch ultimately gave rise to a slogan among hunters, anglers and other public land enthusiasts: “Not. One. Acre.”

The message couldn’t have been clearer: there was no amount of tinkering Lee could do to his proposal that would have made it palatable to the American public. Even a single acre on the chopping block was a nonstarter.

When Lee finally pulled his proposal from President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful” budget bill, public land advocates of all political stripes breathed a collective sigh of relief. On a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Rogan and Ryan Callaghan, director of conservation at MeatEater, declared Lee’s effort “dead,” although Callaghan warned that the anti-federal land movement was certain to take another run at chipping away at the federal estate.

“‘Not one acre’ was the best motto,” Rogan said.

Lee understandably became the prime focus of a bipartisan coalition of public land users and conservationists, but the Utah senator was not the lone actor some have made him out to be. Only a handful of Republicans in Congress publicly spoke against his wildly unpopular proposal. And months before Lee created a firestorm, the Trump administration launched a task force to study selling off as much as 400,000 acres of federal land for housing development — an effort that closely mirrors Lee’s sell-off plan.

A stretch of federal public lands in Utah. Photo credit: Roque Planas

In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner signed an agreement to “identify underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development, streamline land transfer processes, and promote policies that increase the availability of affordable housing while balancing environmental and land-use considerations. In an op-ed announcing the effort, Burgum and Turner wrote that “much of” the 500 million acres Interior manages is “suitable for residential use.”

The ongoing administrative push has received far less attention and scrutiny than the failed GOP effort in Congress. And as public backlash to Lee’s public land sell-off proposal ballooned late last month, some conservatives sought to shelter the Trump administration from criticism.

“The great Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says public land sales are not part of the Trump agenda,” Rep. Ryan Zinke (R--Mont.), who served as Interior chief during Trump’s first term, wrote in a post to X.

But Burgum himself is at the center of the administration’s push to open federal lands for housing development. At a Senate committee hearing in late June, just before Lee introduced his controversial land-sale provision, Burgum made clear the administration was pressing ahead with its effort, telling Lee that “we've got a lot of value trapped in land, particularly bordering our fast-growing metro areas."

Since Lee withdrew his public land sell-off scheme, however, Burgum and other Trump officials have said little if anything about the administration’s similar push to offload federal acres to housing developers.

The memorandum that Burgum and Turner signed in March created a joint task force to study the issue and identify lands for potential sale or lease. It gave representatives of the two agencies until April 15 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 Tuesday about the task force’s progress, an Interior spokesperson referred Public Domain to HUD. HUD did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment. No report has been made public.

Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, told Public Domain that the Trump administration “should learn a lesson from Mike Lee’s failure and immediately drop this cynical attempt to sell off public lands under the guise of housing.”

“We just saw how massively unpopular this idea is, and even if they repackage it, people across the West will continue to reject privatizing public lands,” Carroll wrote in an email.

When Lee withdrew his measure, he blamed “misinformation” and “outright lies” while all but promising to continue his crusade to wrest public lands from the federal government. And he made clear he expects Trump to be an ally in that effort.

“President Trump promised to put underutilized federal land to work for American families, and I look forward to helping him achieve that in a way that respects the legacy of our public lands and reflects the values of the people who use them most,” Lee said in a June 28 statement.

Lee has since taken a more restrained tone, telling Politico’s E&E News it is “too soon to speculate” on whether he will revive public land sales in future legislation.

“Not one acre” became a clear line in the sand during last month’s public lands fight. Whether it will carry over to the Trump administration’s ongoing “Federal Land for Housing” effort remains to be seen.