New analysis: 250 million acres eligible for sale in newly updated budget rec bill

WASHINGTON D.C. (June 16, 2025) — A public land sale mandate included in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s budget reconciliation bill could draw from over 250 million acres’ worth of roadless forests, wilderness study areas and other public lands, according to new analysis from The Wilderness Society (see table below). 

Bill language released by the committee on June 11 mandated disposal of 2-3 million acres of public lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, with few restrictions. By initial estimates, more than 120 million acres were eligible for sale to meet that mark. But updated bill text leaked on June 14 expanded the inventory of lands available, more than doubling the previous estimate. Notably, the June 14 language appears to allow the sale of lands with grazing permits, which had been exempted from the prior version.

Though Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Mike Lee painted the disposal mandate as only affecting “isolated parcels” of “underused” land, the new data make it clear that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to open up bidding on an enormous swath of outdoor recreation areas, wildlife habitat and other areas in order to meet an arbitrary sales quota—all so the Trump administration can lower taxes on the richest people in the country.  

“From the moment public land sales originally made it into the House budget reconciliation bill via shady last-minute amendment, it has been clear lawmakers know such proposals are deeply unpopular. Public land sales only have a prayer of being signed into law if they’re hidden or misrepresented to the American people in some way, which is why Mike Lee has been depicting this as an effort to lightly trim our Forest Service and BLM lands at the margins,” said Michael Carroll, director of the BLM program for The Wilderness Society. “Our data confirm that, in fact, the lands being put on the auction block in the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ cover a wide variety of recreation trails, wildlife habitat and other special places. Now, we find out that Lee and his allies changed the language of the bill to include lands available for livestock grazing too, jeopardizing ranching operations across the West. The communities that love and rely on these public lands deserve a full accounting of what’s at stake and an acknowledgment that once these lands are sold off, they will never get them back.”    

Key takeaways about lands eligible for sale in Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee text:

• The bill mandates arbitrary disposal of between 2.02 million-3.04 million acres of BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands in 11 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming) over the next five years.
• In all, more than 250 million acres will be eligible for sale under the June 14 version of the bill (see table below). The legislation exempts certain federally protected lands like national wilderness areas from potential disposal, but it leaves many administratively designated lands on the table.
• The sell-off provision in the bill would leave tens of millions of acres of lands with wilderness characteristics, wilderness study areas, areas of critical environmental concern and inventoried roadless areas eligible for sale.
• Though national monument lands are exempted from the disposal provision in the bill, an opinion issued by the Trump Justice Department last week argues the president can revoke national monument protections. If the administration acts on that unprecedented and legally dubious finding, it could render an additional 13.5 million acres eligible for sale. 
• 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 opportunities. It gives the secretaries of the interior and agriculture broad discretion to choose which places should ultimately be sold off.
• 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.

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