Utah Sen. Mike Lee Looks To Resurrect Public Land Sell-Off Through GOP Budget
Here we go again.
Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the chair of the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and one of the fiercest anti-public lands lawmakers in Congress, has signaled his intent to try and reinsert public land sales into the sweeping GOP budget bill.
“I gotta go vote, but yes,” Lee told E&E News on Monday when asked if he plans to revive the federal land sell-off provisions that were ultimately yanked from the House version of President Donald Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation package last month.
Lee’s decision to revisit the issue comes as little surprise. Many public land advocates had been anticipating such a move, given his long record of anti-federal land advocacy. Utah Republicans have continued to spearhead the effort to wrest control of public lands from the federal government, despite repeat failures and widespread public opposition, including from their own constituents.
“Senator Lee’s avowed and oft-stated hatred of public lands makes him a true outlier in the Senate,” Travis Hammill, D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement. “His apparent intention to include a public lands sell-off provision in the budget bill, which was fiercely opposed in the House, is wildly out of step with what Americans have made clear that they want to see: federal public lands remaining in public hands.”
Last month, in the middle of the night and at the end of a marathon markup hearing, Reps. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) and Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) introduced an amendment to the House version of the spending bill that would have required the Interior Department to sell off roughly 500,000 acres in Nevada and Utah. In the end, the Maloy-Amodei provisions were stripped from the final bill. Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), the former Interior Department secretary during Trump’s first term, reportedly lobbied against the land sales and signaled he’d vote against the bill if they were included.
Lee’s office did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment Tuesday.
“The idea of selling off America’s public lands is wildly unpopular. That’s why you have anti-public lands members of Congress, like Senator Lee, trying to jam these provisions in budget bills that aren’t subject to the same level of scrutiny as other legislation,” Michael Carroll, public lands campaign director at The Wilderness Society, wrote in an email statement. “There is bipartisan opposition to these cynical attempts to sell off public lands in both the House and the Senate. We are counting on Senators who value public lands, like most Americans do, to reject Senator Lee’s proposals and keep public lands in public hands.”
Senate committees, including the one Lee chairs, are expected to unveil their contributions to the upper chamber’s version of the massive budget bill as early as this week, Politico reported on Monday. If Lee follows through on forcing federal land sales back on the table, he could run into opposition from the same Montana delegation that beat back Maloy’s amendment in the House.
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.
“Senator Daines never has, and never will support the sale of public lands,” a spokesperson for Daines told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle at the time.
Utah loves their public lands. How do these politicians keep getting reelected? Is Citizens United, dark money, Super PACs, etc. to blame for this?