There is an update to this story at the bottom of the post.
The U.S. Senate is marking public lands to be pillaged, and preservation groups are sounding the alarm to call fans of American nature to urgent action.
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, chaired by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, has released its additions to the Senate Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill. The added provisions call for “the sell-off of millions of acres of public lands across the West—including in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming,” the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) says.
If passed—and there’s no reason to believe this wouldn’t get the president’s signature—the provision would trigger a new land rush in the American West, this time for the ultra-wealthy, who will be able to snap up huge areas of pristine public lands quickly, without a minute of public hearings or environmental review.
Public lands to be sold “at breakneck speed”
Lands that have belonged to the American people for generations, or even centuries, would be swiftly transferred to private portfolios.
Members of Trump’s cabinet would have the most say about which lands are wrested from public ownership.
The bill, if passed, demands that available tracts of land be nominated for sale within just 30 days—”at breakneck speed,” says The Wilderness Society—and then sold in batches every 60 days until a stated goal of at least 2 million acres is met.
The speed of the schedule would not give most local groups or governments enough time to mount bids of their own to purchase and protect the land.
That would also mean much of the land transfer would be complete well before the 2026 midterm elections.
“Public lands eligible for sale in the bill encompass over 250 million acres, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors,” the Wilderness Society warns. “[The bill] trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected.”
Although the bill’s authors claim the land sale will result in more housing, the actual legal wording of the bill “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,” according to the Wilderness Society.
That provision would allow land purchasers to simply hold onto land for 10 years before developing it or selling it.
Further undermining the claims of politicians in the Senate about their additions’ value for future housing, much of the wild land in question has already been deemed unsuitable for housing, according to the Wilderness Society.
Would attack national lands and budgets
The bill also attacks staffing at national parks because, according to the NPCA, the measure would “strip all remaining Inflation Reduction Act funding for the Park Service—roughly $267 million dedicated to rebuilding staffing capacity across park units—an urgent need given the 16.5% cut in park staffing since 2023.”
Additionally, the new Senate plan would mandate oil and gas leasing in Arctic regions, more than double logging in national forests, and green-light a 210-mile industrial mining road through Gates of the Arctic National Preserve in Northwest Alaska.
“The provision ignores previous rulings on the destructive impact this project would have on Alaska Native communities and subsistence food resources, including caribou and salmon,” warns the NPCA.
A mass privatization of public lands isn’t just on the table, it’s a key part of their plan.
Dan Ritzman, The Sierra Club
The Wilderness Society cautions that because of recent policy positions taken by the Trump administration, land currently protected as national monuments may be at risk, too. “In a Department of Justice opinion released last week,” the group says, “the Trump Administration dubiously claimed the unprecedented legal authority to revoke national monument protections. If they were to attempt to follow through on this, another 13.5 million acres of our most cherished public lands could be threatened with sell-off.”
Lands currently designated as national monuments include Devils Tower in Wyoming, Muir Woods in California, Aztec Ruins in New Mexico, Giant Sequoia in California, and Natural Bridges in Utah, among many others.
California alone stands to lose land around Yosemite National Park, Mt. Shasta, Lake Tahoe, and Big Sur, according to its federal senator, Adam Schiff.
“Once sold, these lands could become luxury resorts, private developments or something else entirely. These lands belong to the American people, not the highest bidder,” writes Daniel Hart of the NPCA.
To us, this looks like a planned legalized heist of our public lands, and it’s being rushed through at a time when politicians know our attentions have been fractured.
The Sierra Club, a leading U.S. environmental group founded in 1892, says the Senate additions are part of a carefully planned onslaught against public lands by the Republican government.
“As the congressional debate over the federal budget kicked off last month, multiple Trump-aligned members of Congress suggested selling public lands to cover Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for billionaires,” wrote the Sierra Club’s Dan Ritzman on Monday. “Secretary Burgum has previously suggested public lands are assets on national balance sheets, the Senate rejected an opportunity to block a possible sale, and last week, House Republicans waited until the dead of night to slip in a provision to the Trump budget package that could result in sell-offs of public landscapes across Nevada and Utah.”
As Ritzman puts it: “A mass privatization of public lands isn’t just on the table, it’s a key part of their plan.”
You can read the full legislative text of the Senate additions by clicking here.
The Wilderness Society has posted an interactive map of all the public lands eligible for “disposal” (the government’s term), as well as a table of the total acreage each state stands to lose.
Preservation and historical groups, as well as conservation charities, are asking U.S. citizens to make their feelings known to Congressional representatives, especially senators.
You can find contact information for your senators before they vote on the reconciliation bill by using this link. The Sierra Club is also collecting signatures to deliver to elected representatives.
Update, June 24: The Senate parliamentarian ruled that this addition violated a rule that forbids non-budget items to be included in a reconciliation bill. Consequently, it was removed, along with provisions “including the construction of a mining road in Alaska, as well as changes to permitting and oil and gas leasing.”
Sen. Mike Lee is not giving up his attempt to sell off public lands. He responded by saying he would revise his attempt to sell public lands to “remove all U.S. Forest Service land from consideration and limit the proposal to only Bureau of Land Management land within 5 miles of population centers,” according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
