250+ million acres of public lands eligible for sale in SENR budget reconciliation package

The Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee budget reconciliation bill text released June 11, and updated June 14, includes a range of extraordinary giveaways aimed at privatizing public lands and advancing energy dominance at the expense of public lands and resources.

Key takeaways on the public lands sell-off title:

• The bill forces the arbitrary sale of at least 2 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands in 11 Western states over the next five years, and it gives the secretaries of the interior and agriculture broad discretion to choose which places should be sold off.

Over 250 million acres of public lands are eligible for sale in the bill, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas and inventoried roadless areas

• Public lands eligible for sale in the bill encompass over 250 million acres, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors.
• The bill directs what is likely the largest single sale of national public lands in modern history to help cut taxes for the richest people in the country. It trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected.
• The June 14 updated version of the bill makes land with grazing permits eligible for sale. Although lands with undefined “valid existing rights” are still excluded, that term is now best understood to encompass property interests like oil and gas leases, rights-of-way or perfected mining claims.  

Click to see full interactive map (opens in new window)

• The bill’s process for selling off lands runs at breakneck speed, demanding the nomination of tracts within 30 days, then every 60 days until the arbitrary multi-million-acre goal is met, all without hearings, debate or public input.
• The bill sets up relatively under-resourced state and local governments to lose open bidding wars to well-heeled commercial interests. It also fails to give sovereign Tribal Nations the right of first refusal to bid on lands, even for areas that are a part of their traditional homelands or contain sacred sites.
• National monument lands may also be at risk from this proposal. In a Department of Justice opinion released last week, the Trump Administration dubiously claimed the unprecedented legal authority to revoke national monument protections. If they were to attempt to follow through on this, another 13.5 million acres of our most cherished public lands could be threatened with sell-off. 
• The public lands sell-off provision masquerades as a way to provide more housing, but it lacks safeguards to ensure land is used for that purpose, and it sets up a system where lands could be sold or resold for non-housing uses after just 10 years. Research suggests that very little of the land managed by the BLM and USFS is actually suitable for housing.
• Land agencies already have ways to identify public lands for uses like housing if it serves community needs. Jury-rigging a new way to force such “disposal” as part of the budget reconciliation process sets up a precedent to quickly liquidate huge chunks of America’s treasured lands in the future whenever politicians have a pet project to pay for. 

Contact: newsmedia@tws.org /  max_greenberg@tws.org