Public Lands Sales on the Table as Congress Looks for Ways to Raise Revenue

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 thousands more in 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 multiday hearing, considering the proposal. 

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, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and the Outdoor Alliance launched digital campaigns, urging people to defend public lands in social media posts and 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 9 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 the 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, which includes national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management lands, among others. Next, these groups will 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 the Inflation Reduction Act and 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, 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 1970s, 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 Representative 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 Lee 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 to be watching … what happens in the Senate.” 

While lawmakers eye a legislative package, some members of the Trump administration have already adopted Senator Lee’s messaging. Back in March, Doug Burgum, a real estate developer who is now interior secretary, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner cowrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal announcing a plan to sell America’s public land to create more housing.

But according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the places that need affordable housing are near urban centers and are densely populated. If homes are built in remote areas—such as public lands—the cost of building roads, plumbing, and other essential services could quickly balloon, warned the Center for American Progress. The costs to build could put many of these homes out of reach for most Americans.

“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,” David Feinman, the vice president of government affairs at the Conservation Lands Foundation, said. “It’s just another cynical ploy to try to … offer up shared natural resources for sale to the highest bidder and take access to public lands away from the American people.” 

Who benefits 

Perhaps more revealing than public statements or legislative packages are what lawmakers include, or fail to include, in their plans. In both the Trump administration’s plan and Senator Lee’s HOUSES Act, for example, the proposals left out affordability requirements and specifics on who could buy land. For Burgum’s and Turner’s proposal, it only stipulates that those areas be within 10 miles of population centers with over 5,000 people.

“There is a huge contingent of developers who would love to get their hands on some of these places,” Clark said. “Certainly, in areas where there may be a shortage of available land or just the ability to build in really incredible places.”

Robison said this is what’s occurred in Idaho. In 2016, billionaire developers from Texas purchased nearly 200,000 acres of timberland. The public enjoyed access to the property from all the previous landowners—timber companies, the state, and the federal government. After the land was sold, Idahoans suddenly faced armed security and locked gates on formerly accessible roads. Last year, the same developers put 60,000 acres of the land they bought on the market for roughly $150 million. Similar stories exist in Montana, where a developer purchased thousands of acres of timberland to create the Yellowstone Club, which cost over a quarter million dollars to join. In January 2025, the club’s new owners entered a deal with the US Forest Service to expand near the Crazy Mountains. 

“We've seen this before, where trailhead signs, your favorite elk hunting camp, or fishing spot, or a place to harvest a Christmas tree, or backcountry ski area gets blocked off with ‘no trespassing’ signs,” Robison said. “In addition, the ecosystem services, whether it's for clean water protection or wildlife, those are at the whim of the owners.”

With pending conversations to include public land sales in budget reconciliation, many advocates fear this could be the start of something bigger than just housing. Kristen Brengel, the vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, worries the Trump administration may use public lands to solve a manufactured emergency, such as the need to build data centers. Lawmakers have pitched selling a few select lands, but if something like this were to pass, selling just a few areas would make the plan unviable, Brengel added.

“I've done some more research on it, and if they use budget reconciliation, they're not going to be able to be particular about what land gets sold,” Brengel said. “They're not going to be particular about who can buy it. This would have to be sort of a broad attack on public lands.”