Public lands for sale in SENR budget reconciliation package

The Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee budget reconciliation bill text released June 11 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. This, just weeks after bipartisan outrage over land sell off text threatened passage of the House bill. That provision was ultimately removed from the House bill and should be removed from the Senate accordingly.
• 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.
• Public lands eligible for sale in the bill encompass over 120 million acres, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors.
• 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.
• 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.