FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 12, 2025
CONTACT: Lisa Young, Idaho Chapter of Sierra Club Director, lisa.young@sierraclub.org, 20-841-8587
Idaho Sierra Club Urges Senators Risch, Crapo to Oppose Selling Public Lands in Idaho
BOISE, IDAHO – Senate Republicans are supercharging an effort to sell huge swaths of public lands to private developers in Idaho to pay for extending Donald Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires.
Last night, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released its revised portion of the sprawling GOP budget reconciliation package. The text not only reinstates language mandating the sale of public lands, but vastly increases the acreage of those required sales. The language in the bill sets up the sale of up to 3 million acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land nationwide. That could include hundreds of thousands of acres in Idaho, which would mean a loss to Idahoans of places they love to recreate so developers can sell luxury homesites to billionaires.
The new language would force the sale of millions of acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in twelve western states, including Idaho—far more than the approximately 500,000 acres of land sales in Nevada and Utah called for in the original House version of the budget reconciliation bill. That language, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, was stricken from the House version of the bill in the face of bipartisan opposition in the chamber and overwhelming public outrage.
In response, Lisa Young, Idaho Chapter of Sierra Club director, released the following statement:
“We are calling on Senators Risch and Crapo to do right by the people of Idaho and oppose selling our public lands to the highest bidder. This bill would give billionaires and corporate polluters free rein to drill, mine, and log these treasured landscapes and sell millions of acres of public lands to private developers, locking out American families forever. Here in Idaho, we will remind Senators Risch and Crapo that our public lands are not for sale, and we call on them to do everything in their power to fight this bill.”