The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has introduced its portion of the spending megabill.
If passed, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service would be required to sell millions of acres of public lands across 11 Western states including Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
The House of Representatives’ version of the spending bill originally included provisions to sell hundreds of thousands of acres of BLM land in Nevada and Utah, but that was scrapped at the last minute.
The Senate’s bill would mandate that both the BLM and the Forest Service sell between 0.5% and 0.75% of each agency’s respective lands across 11 Western states — including Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. That totals between 2 and 3 million acres.
During a committee hearing on Wednesday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, said he had no details to share, even though the text of the bill was released hours later.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) said she found it concerning that the head of the agency that would lead on any such sales would not have more details to share with the committee.
“I'm not actively engaged in negotiations,” Burgum told Cortez Masto.
“You're not actively engaged at all in the conversation around the sale of federal lands in the reconciliation package, the proposal,” she said. “You're not involved in that.”
“We've had — there's conceptual talks about how that would lay out, but there has not been negotiations,” he said.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, says the aim of the sales is for affordable housing. The bill’s text includes some criteria for lands that should be prioritized for sale, like those adjacent to developed areas and with access to existing infrastructure, though there are no hard and fast requirements.
Reactions from the West
Steve Bloch is the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). He pointed out that the text of the bill goes contrary to its stated aims.
“There is no requirement in this legislation that these lands be sold for affordable housing,” he said. “There is an affordable housing crisis in the West. This is not a serious way to approach it.”
Will Roush, the executive director of western Colorado-based Wilderness Workshop, called it a “farce.”
“Yes, we will need some more land for affordable housing,” he said. “We don't need two to 3 million acres scattered around the West on our public lands.”
Other provisions in the bill reduce the royalties that oil and gas companies pay to lease on public lands.
“There's some really problematic provisions mandating oil and gas leasing, mandating logging and timber sales,” said Roush. “Ordinarily, those would be at the very top of the priority list. We've got two to three million acres of public land that could be sold off, so that's at the top.”
“It really takes your breath away that they're just so brazenly in the pocket of the oil and gas industry, in the pockets of developers,” said Bloch.
Both SUWA and Wilderness Workshop have said they are committed to fighting the sale of public lands, and are encouraging their members to contact their Congressional representatives.
“This is not something that most people want,” Roush said. “And I think we need to make that really clear to everybody in Congress. That's how we beat back the similar provision to sell off half a million acres that was in the House version of this bill.”
Polling indicates that selling federal public lands, including for housing, is a deeply unpopular policy for Western voters. Colorado College’s Conservation in the West poll shows that 82% of voters across eight states don’t think federal public lands should be sold for housing development. In Colorado, that number is 87%, 81% in Utah, and 86% in Wyoming.
“I really take comfort in the fact that… people are not simply walking away from these amazing Western landscapes and throwing up their hands, but they're digging in and fighting to save them,” Bloch said. “And that's the work we're doing here and that's the work so many citizens and conservation groups around the West are up to.”
There is a way to go before any actual public lands sales are finalized. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will need to vote on a version of the bill that will go to the full Senate for approval, and then the House will have to approve it as well.
Some Republicans have indicated that selling federal public lands would prevent them from voting for the spending megabill, including Montana’s congressional delegation. Montana was notably excluded from the list of states where federal public land sales would occur—the only Western state to be excluded.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
