Among the several controversial proposals emerging from the U.S. Senate this week as it considers the tax and spending bill that President Donald Trump has promoted as “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is one that would make parts of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state, the Buffalo Hills Wilderness Study Area in Nevada, and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona eligible for sale to housing developers.
The proposal, laid out in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s draft portion of the bill, would force the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, over the next five years, to identify and sell between 2.2 million and 3.3 million acres across 11 Western states for “the development of housing or to address associated infrastructure to support local housing needs.” In total, 250 million acres of land would be eligible for those mandatory sales — including campgrounds and other recreation sites, roadless areas, and important wildlife habitat. The bill excludes protected areas like national parks and designated national recreation areas.
In a statement, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, called the proposal “a complete betrayal of future generations.” Conservation groups have likewise pilloried it as “a shameless ploy to sell off pristine public lands for trophy homes and gated communities” in order to pay for “tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.”
The proposal expands on a failed attempt in the House version of the spending bill to sell 500,000 acres of federal lands in Nevada and Utah. That proposal was nixed due to opposition from Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican from Montana and the former interior secretary. The new, dramatically expanded proposal came from Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, who said in a YouTube video that federal land ownership is “not fair.”
“We’re opening underused federal land to expand housing, support local development, and get Washington, D.C. out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow,” he said. “We’re turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value.“ The states wherein the land sales are being proposed are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Zinke’s state of Montana is notably not on the list.
Many Indigenous and environmental advocates have noted that the idea of “public lands” disguises the ways that the territories were stolen from tribes. Beginning in the 16th century, white European settlers swept across North America, expelling Native Americans in order to build homesteads, railroads, and other infrastructure.
After the founding of the country, the U.S. government extended that dispossession, often by force or coercion, and to this day land holders such as universities profit from stolen tribal lands. The federal government now claims up to 63 percent of some Western states, with high concentrations in Idaho and Utah. While a faction of the Republican party has spent more than 50 years advocating against “federal colonialism” in the West, some Republicans are intensifying their efforts to impose expropriation of the same land in a new way.
Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images
From his first day in office, Trump has promised to turn over federal lands to private interests — including logging interests and oil and gas companies, as well as housing developers. In March, the Trump administration launched a task force to identify “underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development,” an ostensible effort to address the U.S.’s affordable housing crisis.
Critics say home affordability is a product of multiple factors like migration trends and construction costs, exacerbated by cities not prioritizing building new housing within their limits to account for new demand. But opening up remote areas far from existing infrastructure is, they say, a misguided approach to bringing down housing costs.
“The housing argument is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Jordan Schreiber, government relations director for the nonprofit The Wilderness Society. “It doesn’t even pass the laugh test.”
Some advocacy groups and experts have also noted that Lee’s proposal in the spending bill, which he reportedly declined to share with most other lawmakers for weeks before unveiling it on June 11, does not include any affordability requirements, leaving room for profit-motivated developers to build large ranch houses, second homes for wealthy urbanites, or short-term rentals to be listed on Airbnb. In some cases, land sales have already yielded the creation of luxury real estate clubs.
”There would be no significant guardrails to prevent valued public lands from being sold for trophy homes, pricey vacation spots, exclusive golf communities, or other developments,” the think tank Center for American Progress wrote in an analysis of the proposed bill.
Democrats, conservation groups, and representatives from the outdoor industry opposing Lee’s proposal have emphasized the irreplaceable nature of the land in question. “Our public lands are not disposable assets,” Patrick Berry, CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a group that seeks to preserve undeveloped land for hunting and fishing, told Colorado Public Radio.
Schreiber, of The Wilderness Society, said the bill is “hugely problematic from a tribal perspective” because it fails to give tribes the right of first refusal to bid on lands that are part of their ancestral homelands. (It’s also arguable that even the idea of giving tribes the option to buy back lands that were stolen from them is a low bar for justice.) Schreiber also criticized the bill for making land sales possible “at breakneck speed” without public hearings or input.
In a Colorado College poll released this January, only 14 percent of registered voters across eight Western states said they supported selling “some limited areas of national public lands to developing housing on natural areas.” Nearly 90 percent said they visited federally owned lands at least once in the past year.
Even among Republican policymakers, Lee’s proposal is controversial. A spokesperson for Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho told The Spokesman-Review, a newspaper in Spokane, Washington, that the senator is still reviewing the proposal but that he “does not support transferring public lands to private ownership.” A spokesperson for Senator Jim Risch, a Republican from Idaho, said that once federal land is sold, “we’ll never get it back.”
