Beware America – Public lands are for sale

Today is the day when you just have to say, NO! No, to the sale of acres of our national pride. A half million here. a half million there… If you turn your head for a single moment, public lands could disappear in the blink of an eye, and that’s what several senators and members of congress are hoping will happen. And once they are sold, folks, they are gone FOREVER!! Slip in a few obscure paragraphs into the gargantuan spending and tax bill, that’s already been passed by the House, that’s on its way to the Senate and the next thing you know…

You see, public land sales are introduced as PORK or pork-bellying. Let me introduce you to the concept if you’re not already familiar with it.

The term “pork barrel” dates back to the 19th century, originating from a time when plantation owners would distribute barrels of salted pork to enslaved people. Over time, it became a political metaphor for public funds being distributed to legislators’ districts, often in exchange for political support. The phrase gained widespread use in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a way to describe congressional spending that prioritized localized benefits over broader national policy objectives.

A major tool for pork barrel spending is the use of earmarks, which are provisions in legislation that allocate funds for specific projects, often without a competitive review process. Earmarks allow lawmakers to secure funding for local initiatives, such as infrastructure improvements, research grants, or community programs.

Supporters argue that earmarks help address local needs that might otherwise be overlooked. Critics, however, claim that they encourage wasteful spending and political favoritism. Due to these concerns, Congress temporarily banned earmarks in 2011, but they were reinstated in 2021 with added transparency requirements.

Pork barrel spending typically occurs through the legislative appropriations process. While Congress has tried to curb these expenditures, earmarks have historically been a primary method for securing them. The process generally follows these steps:

1. Proposal and Negotiation – Lawmakers propose funding for specific projects, often as amendments to broader appropriations bills. These projects may include infrastructure improvements, research grants, or economic development initiatives.
2. Committee Review – Congressional committees review spending provisions, sometimes adding earmarks for particular projects.
3. Inclusion in Larger Bills – Instead of being standalone legislation, pork barrel projects are typically embedded within large spending bills, making it difficult to reject them without voting against the entire bill.
4. Passage and Implementation – Once the bill is passed and signed into law, allocated funds are distributed to the designated projects.

While the Senate combs through the current giant budget bill, H.R. 1: One Big Beautiful Bill Act — yes, that’s it’s official title — a 1,100+ page document. We know the big picture but little about the details because it hasn’t been available for long enough for anyone to actually read it, and if it’s passed by the July 4th deadline, 16 million acres in California are at risk of being sold within the next five years and that includes parcels of land in areas adjacent to Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Big Sur and Lake Tahoe! Are you shocked? You should be.

A map published by the Wilderness Society, a nonprofit land conservation organization, reveals which parcels of land across 11 states would be up for grabs, in accordance with the land sale proposal detailed by Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

Lee has been unrelenting in his push for the sale of public lands, saying it could promote economic growth and housing across the western U.S. and could generate upward of $10 billion for the federal government.

In all, up to 3 million acres across all states would be authorized to be sold out of 258 million eligible acres across the West. Those sales could take place in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

“They capped it at 3 million acres, but 258 million acres is on the menu,” Michael Carroll, Bureau of Land Management campaign director for the Wilderness Society, told SFGATE. “People could have their favorite hiking open space or outdoor areas sold off right out from under their community. It’s a drastic change in what we could see on the ground across the West.”

These are not disposable places as some proponents of land sales have claimed, they are some of the most significant intact landscapes in the United States. The Arctic, Otero Mesa, the Owyhee Canyonlands, Snoqualmie forest—these places are vital not only to the human communities in and around them but also to vulnerable wildlife struggling to survive in an increasingly developed world.

This effort is in and of itself entirely destructive—especially when considered with other provisions in the bill that will mandate oil lease sales in the Arctic Refuge, force construction of a mining road through a national park and more than double the amount of logging in western national forests—but it also sets a dangerous precedent that members of Congress can simply liquidate our public lands to fund their pet projects.

Over 250 million acres of public lands are eligible for sale in the bill, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas and inventoried roadless areas

• Public lands eligible for sale in the bill encompass over 250 million acres, including local recreation, wilderness study, and inventoried roadless areas, also, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors.
• The bill directs what is likely the largest single sale of national public lands in modern history to help cut taxes. It trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected.
• The June 14 updated version of the bill makes land with grazing permits eligible for sale. Although lands with undefined “valid existing rights” are still excluded, that term is now best understood to encompass property interests like oil and gas leases, rights-of-way or perfected mining claims.  
• 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.
• 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.
• National monument lands may also be at risk from this proposal. In a Department of Justice opinion released last week, 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. 
• The public lands sell-off provision masquerades as a way to provide more housing, but it 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. Research suggests that very little of the land managed by the BLM and USFS is actually suitable for housing.
• Land agencies already have ways to identify public lands for uses like housing if it serves community needs. Jury-rigging a new way to force such “disposal” as part of the budget reconciliation process sets up a precedent to quickly liquidate huge chunks of America’s treasured lands in the future whenever politicians have a pet project.

Theodore Roosevelt

The conservation legacy of Theodore (affectionately known as Teddy) Roosevelt is found in the 230 million acres of public lands he helped establish during his presidency. Much of that land – 150 million acres – was set aside as national forests. Roosevelt created the present-day USFS in 1905, an organization within the Department of Agriculture. The idea was to conserve forests for continued use. An adamant proponent of utilizing the country’s resources, Roosevelt wanted to insure the sustainability of those resources.

Roosevelt was also the first president to create a Federal Bird Reserve, and he would establish 51 of these during his administration. These reserves would later become today’s national wildlife refuges, managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Today there is a national wildlife refuge in every state, and North Dakota boasts the most refuges of any state in the country.

During Roosevelt’s administration, the National Park System grew substantially. When the National Park Service was created in 1916 – seven years after Roosevelt left office – there were 35 sites to be managed by the new organization. Roosevelt helped created 23 of these.

According to the National Conservation Association, In early May, the House Committee on Natural Resources voted to direct the Department of the Interior to transfer thousands of acres of public lands in Utah and Nevada to counties and other local entities, which in turn could auction off the lands to the highest bidder without any public process, environmental review or community engagement.

Park advocates have witnessed and successfully prevented similar threats in Utah before, and while the counties have not shared their plans for the parcels publicly or stated they would sell the land for development, the possibility for them to do so exists.

A majority of American voters in Western states, regardless of political affiliation, oppose giving away public land to state and local governments or selling it off to private development interests. These aren’t just open spaces. They are habitats for park wildlife and many of the iconic landscapes that make national parks America’s best idea. Yet, some members of the House Natural Resources Committee chose to go against Americans’ interest and expose Zion National Park, one of the most visited parks, to the outrageous idea of selling our public land for financial gain.

What the proposed legislation really does is reshape national parks and public lands by greenlighting the sell-off of public lands in Utah and Nevada, clawing back Inflation Reduction Act funding originally set aside to address the climate crisis, proposing further slashes to an already understaffed National Park Service, and accelerating oil and gas leasing near public lands.

In creating this amendment, the committee did not engage public or local community input or environmental review. There was no congressional hearing, and a vote was rushed through by a split vote at midnight.

Selling off sites that belong to all Americans through a backdoor deal without any public input or accountability is the antithesis of American values. Over 100 years ago, the National Park System was established to preserve these special places.

Local communities have repeatedly raised concerns over development encroaching on Zion, risking wildlife habitat and the visitor experience — and selling these extraordinary lands could leave them exploited, divided and mismanaged.

If Congress allows a public lands sell-off to happen near a treasure like Zion, they are putting all of America’s national parks and public lands at risk.

You can do your part by urging your lawmakers to oppose these sales by completing the form found here or you can call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to connect with your Senators in Washington D.C.

The National Wildlife Federation Blog – May 8, 2025

In a late-night move that flew under the radar for most Americans, Representatives Mark Amodei (R-NV) and Celeste Maloy (R-UT) proposed an amendment to the House Natural Resources Committee’s Reconciliation Bill that aims to speed up the process of disposing of federal public lands in Utah and Nevada. The amendment passed largely along partisan lines, with Rep. Hurd (R-CO) serving as the one dissenting Republican vote. 

The amendment directs the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to dispose of large areas of public land. It overrides the current system laid out by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), the law that has governed how we manage public lands since 1976.

Rather than requiring careful analysis and local input, the amendment mandates that these lands be sold, exchanged, or transferred on an expedited timeline—essentially cutting corners on the planning, environmental review, and public participation that would normally happen under FLPMA.

Congress passed FLPMA in 1976, and ensures public lands are managed for multiple uses—grazing, recreation, energy, wildlife and fisheries, clean water, and more. It also establishes that lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management remain in public ownership unless there’s a strong case for disposal. Here’s how it typically works:

• BLM conducts land use planning, including public meetings and coordination with state and local governments.
• Lands identified for disposal go through a transparent review process, often including environmental analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Just because land is identified as suitable for disposal, does not require that the land must be sold, nor does it provide any timeline for sale. 
• The public gets a chance to weigh in, including local residents, hunters, ranchers, Tribes, and others who use or value these lands.
• Sales occur at fair market value, and include public notice and a competitive bidding process, unless certain exemptions apply.
• Congressional notification required for sales exceeding 2,500 acres. Congress has 90-days for either body to formally disapprove, or the sale can proceed. 

Of course, this means that the process can be slow because of all of the various boxes that must be checked before a parcel is sold. However, that process exists for good reason. It ensures that land isn’t sold off just to meet a short-term political or budgetary goal and that local voices are heard before public land changes hands. Remember, public lands can only be sold once. Once sold for development, they are gone from the federal estate forever.  

Again, You can do your part by urging your lawmakers to oppose these sales by completing the form found here or you can call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to connect with your Senators in Washington D.C.

Thank you.