Public Lands at Risk as Congress Looks for Ways to Raise Revenue

Americans could be locked out of thousands of acres of public lands if this proposal is signed into law

SIERRA-Lindsey
Thu, 2025-05-08 05:00

The entrance to a Bureau of Land Management field office in Barstow, California. | Photo by LPETTET/iStock

Lindsey Botts

May 8 2025

Since the beginning of the year, President Trump has urged Congress to pass “one big, beautiful bill,” referring to a legislative package that would extend and expand his 2017 tax cuts. Shortly after, some lawmakers began floating the idea of selling public land to help offset those cuts. On Tuesday night, the House Natural Resources Committee delivered on that suggestion, putting forward a legislative package that authorizes the sale of over 11,000 acres of public land in Utah and Nevada.
Notably, the amendment to sell these lands, submitted by Republican Representatives Celeste Maloy and Mark Amodei, was absent in the initial budget framework, released last week. And there was no mention of selling public lands during the multi-day hearing, considering the proposal. The markup does not indicate what or who the lands would be sold to.
The potential sale has united Americans across ideologies and the political spectrum, ranging from sportsmen to wildlife advocates. Throughout April, national groups like The National Wildlife Federation, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and the Outdoor Alliance launched digital campaigns, urging people to defend public lands in social media posts, op-eds, and by contacting representatives. The Conservation Alliance created a coalition of over 60 businesses called Brands for Public Lands, which penned an April 9th letter to Congress, stating that no public lands should be included in the budget process. At the state level, groups such as Oregon Wild, the Idaho Conservation League, and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance have been communicating with lawmakers, encouraging them to support public land protections and keep land sales out of budget conversations.
Now, many of these coalitions are blasting this latest proposal to sell off America's public land. Next, they'll shift their focus to opposing similar proposals in the Senate, which could release a separate markup as early as the beginning of June.

“I think the reality is that this is a slippery slope of doing this. It is taking away a resource owned by all of the American people and selling it off so that billionaires can have a little bit more money in their pockets,” Jordan Schreiber, government relations director at The Wilderness Society, said of including public lands in budget conversations. “It'll be a sprint through the month of May to make sure that folks are hearing from on-the-ground advocates for public lands, making sure that Senators know that this is important to them.”
“I think the reality is that this is a slippery slope of doing this. It is taking away a resource owned by all of the American people and selling it off so that billionaires can have a little bit more money in their pockets."
Balancing The Budget
Budget reconciliation allows lawmakers to enact funding and tax legislation using a simple majority vote and no debate in the Senate. Traditionally, it has been a bipartisan effort to balance the nation’s debt. But since 2000, lawmakers have mostly used its simple majority threshold to pass legislation when one party controls both the executive and legislative branches. This is how President Biden passed both the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. And it’s how Trump passed his first round of tax cuts in 2017. This rare opportunity to pass legislation with little Congressional resistance is why some believe Republicans are trying to use it to sell public lands.
Under the guise of raising billions of dollars in revenue, it’s also provided Republicans an opportunity to rescind several public land protections. Their latest markup includes language to increase oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, allow mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, revive a road project through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, and offer companies a way to pay for expedited environmental reviews. Many of these ideas were noted in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, a right-wing playbook for gutting the federal government, but lawmakers are framing their proposal as a win for the nation’s budget.
“Yesterday was a truly historic day for our committee, where we passed our part of the America-first budget reconciliation bill,” wrote the House Natural Resources Committee after passing its markup. “Our committee was tasked with finding $1 billion in savings, which we exceeded by finding $18.5 billion in savings and revenue.”
Still, the consensus on finalizing this full package is far from unanimous. Earlier this year, Democratic Representative Gabe Vasquez and Republican Representative Ryan Zinke sponsored a law that would ban any sale of public land without the authorization of Congress, except in a few limited circumstances. More recently, Democratic senators Martin Heinrich and John Hickenlooper offered language to prohibit public land sales in an amendment to a budget resolution, a first step toward a final budget reconciliation package. The amendment was defeated, but every democrat and two republicans supported the measure.
In the coming weeks, the House budget committee will compile various separate committee markups into a single bill, which will go to the House for a floor vote. The Senate committees, including the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will also have to draft their own spending proposal to reach budget objectives. For the reconciliation bill to become law, both the Senate and House must agree on the same details. In short, there are still a lot of variables that need to coalesce before these plans become law.
“This is a very precarious process, and because the margins are so slim, there's a chance this whole process falls apart,” Schreiber said. “It takes time. It takes a lot of conversations, a lot of buy-in from members.”
“The lack of affordable housing in America is a serious issue, but the administration and anti-public lands advocates in Congress are using this issue as a Trojan horse."
Why Sell Off Public Lands
The idea of usurping federal authority over public lands has been around since the Sagebrush Rebellion in the ‘70s, when anti-public lands agitators tried to wrest control from the federal government. While this was more a rebuke of environmental regulations, attempts to take over public land in recent years have seemed to focus on finances. For example, John Robison, the public lands and wildlife director at the Idaho Conservation League, said that if America’s public lands were transferred to the state of Idaho, they would be managed for profit, not wildlife or public access.
“You can recreate on many state … lands up to a point until that recreation or that wildlife management starts to conflict with the real goal of producing revenue,” Robison said. "The real concern is that the State cannot afford to manage the firefighting and management costs of lands and would be forced to sell them off to private interests.”
While transferring public lands to states or selling them has been suggested many times, the concept remains deeply unpopular. In 2005, California Republican Richard Pombo tried and failed to mandate public lands sales. Less than a decade later, lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to get all federal lands in Utah turned over to the state. In 2017, Utah Senator Jason Chaffetz introduced legislation to sell over 3 million acres to western states. The bill was seen as so toxic that he refused to advance it following public outcry. He left Congress, citing the pushback as one of the reasons for his departure.
More recently, however, selling public lands has moved closer to the center of the Republican Party. Utah Republican Senator Mike sponsored the HOUSES Act in both 2023 and 2024, which would authorize the transfer of public land to states in order to purportedly address the nation’s affordable housing crisis. The bill failed to gain traction, but some say that Senator Lee may attempt to get public land sales included in budget reconciliation.
“Senator Lee is an anti-federal government, anti-public land ideologue, and he will take every effort to try to sell off public lands if he can,” Neal Clark, the wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said. “I absolutely would not put that past him, and I think everyone needs t