Proposed public lands sale draws bipartisan backlash, with hundreds of millions of acres on the table

A proposal to sell millions of acres of public lands in the West is drawing significant backlash.

The nonprofit Wilderness Society released an analysis and interactive map, showing that even more land could be impacted than originally anticipated. In updated text of the bill obtained by the Wilderness Society on June 14, land with grazing permits would be included as eligible for sale. Around 250 million acres of land would be eligible for sale across eleven Western states, including Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Republicans in the Senate say the sales would be for affordable housing, though nothing in the bill mandates that the sale be for housing, let alone affordable housing. The bill outlines criteria for lands that should be prioritized for sale, but none of those guidelines are mandatory for a sale to take place. It mandates that between 2 and 3 million acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands are sold. National parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, and national recreation areas would be excluded from any sale.

From the bill’s introduction on June 11, the criticism has been swift and plentiful.

Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) called it “shameful.”

“It is a five-alarm fire for hunters here in Colorado, for fishermen, for conservationists, for recreationists, and for every Coloradan folks who enjoy these lands and who are committed to preserving them for future generations,” he said.

Neguse credited bipartisan cooperation between Democrats and Republicans like Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) and Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.) for the defeat of a smaller lands sale provision in the House version of the budget bill. In that proposal, several hundreds of thousands of acres would have been sold in Nevada and Utah, but it was axed from the megabill at the last minute.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said that once these lands are sold, it’s nearly impossible to get them back.

“It's an important part of our obligation as elected officials in our state and in the West to protect the work that our parents and grandparents did for us, much less the legacy that our kids and grandkids are gonna want to embrace,” he said.

148 environmental advocacy groups signed a letter to the Senate, calling on the language outlining the sale of public lands to be struck from the budget bill.

“Selling off public lands is short-sighted, self-serving and irreversible,” the letter reads. “These lands belong to all Americans. Once they’re sold, they’re gone for good — fences go up, access disappears and they are lost to the public forever. Westerners and people across the country overwhelmingly support the protection of public lands and have consistently rejected attempts to sell them off. Time and again, the public has made it clear: our forests, desert lands and open spaces are not and should not be for sale.”

Conservative responses to public land sales

This larger Senate version of the land sale has drawn criticism from both sides of the aisle, including from the conservative American Conservation Coalition, whose founder called it “an anti-American action.”

Isaiah Menning, the ACC’s external affairs director, said there were a few different reasons conservatives weren’t happy with the bill.

“Our concern with the provision in this bill, is that it sets an arbitrary limit or mandate on how much land ought to be sold, and we’re concerned that land could be sold and impair some of the benefits that we get from federal land,” he said. “Our ideal scenario is that broadly, we don’t do mass land sales, but we’d rather equip local communities to help us steward those lands for the benefit of the entire nation.”

“Those benefits are primarily around hunting access, hiking access, recreational access, and then also the great ecosystem benefits that we can get from that land,” he said. “American biodiversity and the wildlife we have, especially big game, is a major part of the American heritage, and we should conserve our sublime landscapes that we have in the West. Theodore Roosevelt identified this.”

Menning said public lands with grazing permits was another aspect that was especially concerning for the ACC.

“Now there are ranching families who, for generations, have been stewarding these lands,” he said. “The grazing allotments are transferable and usually attached to a certain piece of property, and so it’s really quite important to many of these families. Including these kinds of land in a sale is a point of concern for us, because these… ranchers have been so important in stewarding these landscapes. So we’d like to see those kinds of voices be more involved in the stewardship of federal lands, ultimately for the benefit of all Americans.”

He also said that though one of the stated goals of the bill is to reduce the federal deficit, this could actually hurt the government’s ability to make money off of federal public lands, and identified economic prosperity and energy abundance as conservative values.

“You could also see sales of lands that are really useful for mineral development or energy development that are really beneficial for the American public,” he said. “That could hamper our ability to use those resources, and… also hamper the ability of the federal government to gain revenue from those resources.”

Montana is the only Western state excluded from the proposal. Montana Republicans have previously been opposed to the sale of federal public lands, which could potentially hamper Republicans’ ability to guide any budget across the finish line. Both chambers of Congress are closely divided.

In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Zinke said he was still against the sale of public lands.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who chairs the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, has not responded to requests for comment, but has been actively posting in defense of the public lands sale on X.

Lee posted repeatedly on both his official Senate account and his personal account @BasedMikeLee in defense of the proposal.

Lee also went on conservative talk show host Glenn Beck’s radio show on June 19 to defend the proposal.

“This is not the crown jewel land,” he said. “This is garden-variety land that's just sitting there vacant where people can, do, and should live.”

During his approximately 12 minutes on the show, Lee also said that there would be further limitations on what land would be eligible for sale.

“(We’re) working on changes to further limit eligible lands, to those Forest Service-owned lands within two miles of a population center, and lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management within five miles of a population center,” he told Beck. “So this deals with land that is only in or near a place where people live, and it doesn't authorize the sale, it authorizes a process.”

Lee’s office has not responded to requests for that information, nor when those updated limitations would be released.

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