In GOP’s Public Lands Sell-Off, The Biggest Loser Is You

House proposes selling nearly 100,000 acres of your land to fund billionaire tax cuts

Late last night, Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee snuck an amendment into their budget resolution package that will mandate the sale of nearly 100,000 acres of public lands in Utah and Nevada. Land you currently own. That joins other efforts led by the White House and Department of the Interior, and the rest of House Republicans to find a legal mechanism for a mass sell off of public land. They’re doing that to help fund tax cuts for billionaires, a goal they’ll also be raising costs on working and middle class Americans to achieve.

Update May 7, 6:00PM (Mountain): Sources close to the legislation report total acreage made available for sale by this budget may be in excess of 500,000 acres.

You and I own 640 million acres of land in this country, and that’s managed on our behalf by the federal government. Those lands includes incredibly special places like National Parks (which the President is proposing the sell of in his budget proposal), but also many more acres of National Forest, BLM land, and more.

That arrangement is incredibly efficient, generating billions of dollars in both economic activity and income for local, state, and federal governments, with relatively minimal investments. The National Park Service, for instance, operates on an annual budget that includes only $3 billion in taxpayer money, but generates $55.6 billion in economic output. Every dollar that taxpayers spend on national parks generates more than $18 for the economy. The Bureau of Land Management has an annual budget of only $1.3 billion, but activities it manages generate $252.1 billion each year. Every dollar that taxpayers spend on the BLM creates $194 for the economy.

All of that activity—energy, recreation, tourism, grazing, mining, timber, etc—and all of the millions of jobs it creates is then taxed by all the various levels of government involved. And while it’s common to hear Republican politicians in western states complain that they can’t apply property taxes to federally-managed public land, that revenue is more than made up for with Payments in Lieu of Taxes—guaranteed income requiring zero investment from the states that receive it—which those states then use to fund important programs like road construction and public schools. All of that helps reduce the tax burden you and I ultimately experience.

If that system works so well, why are Republican politicians trying to break it, and sell our land? Simple: greed. Given the numbers above, it’s easy to understand how much value all that land holds. And that’s why the energy and real estate development industries are so eager to get ahold of it. Pull up the Open Secrets page for any politician proposing a land sale—say Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), or Representative Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas), and at the top of the list of campaign donors you’ll see those industries.

What about the Executive Branch? One of their big goals is to deliver over $5 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires over the next 10 years. Given the currently dysfunctional nature of Congress, the only way to deliver that will be through budget reconciliation, a legislative maneuver that works around the Senate filibuster to enable passage on a simple majority vote. But in order to qualify, legislation can only cover dollars and cents, and any measure that adds to the deficit must be offset by equivalent savings or new revenue.

But the math that determines those profits and losses is created by lawmakers themselves. And as soon as it convened for this new session in January, the Republican-led house passed a rules package that would enable it to sell public lands without including a tabulation of their ongoing revenue. That means they can simply take the sale price of a land parcel, and cut the taxes paid by Elon Musk or one of his corporations by an equivalent amount, without figuring in revenues currently created on that land.

Pushing through tax cuts for billionaires like himself using budget reconciliation is what Doug Burgum was talking about when, during his Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of the Interior, he referred to public lands as, “assets on America’s balance sheet.” And that tax cut he’s trying to give himself is also the reason why he’s proposed selling 400,000 acres of BLM land across the west, under the guise of “affordable housing.”

The reason Doug is lying about the reason why this administration wants to sell your land is that doing so requires both an act of Congress, and a purpose that must be for the national interest. What the House Natural Resources Committee just did is give the administration that act.

Backing up a bit, assembling a federal budget is a messy process. The White House will publish its own budget which, since they don’t write laws, is more a wish list of priorities they hope Congress will take up. This year, that includes measures like slashing the park service’s budget by nearly a third, along with selling some national parks and other types of land. Then, both houses of Congress will convene their various committees to write budget proposals for the economic sectors each is responsible for, and those will then be combined to form an actual piece of legislation that will be voted on by the full body, before being sent to the other chamber, and eventually the President.

What the House Natural Resources Committee has just done is include the sale of public lands in its section of the budget package that will now be voted on by the entire House. And given the extremely partisan nature of our current political moment, in which the President has declared his intention to use Elon Musk’s money to fund a primary challenge to any lawmaker who works against his priorities, it’s unlikely that budget package will meet much resistance.

The actual contents of that HNRC budget are currently a little unclear. After stalling all day yesterday, they waited until the early hours of this morning to bring the proposal they ended up passing. And its language around what lands it intends to force the sale of are listed by counties and cities in Nevada and Utah, rather than by their actual locations, boundaries or acreage. Other outlets have reported the total at 11,000 acres across areas in both Nevada and Utah, but a source close to the process is telling me there’s 11,000 acres in Utah alone, with another “75,000+” pulled from BLM land in Nevada. Whatever the end amount actually is, this could also establish legislative precedent and authority for further sales of public land both in those states, and elsewhere.

And those land sales aren’t the only terrible things the HNRC has included in the House budget package. Also in there are:

• Toxic mining that will pollute Minnesota’s Boundary Waters.

• Road construction through sensitive area’s of Alaska’s Brooks Range.

• Oil extraction in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, a move that will condemn polar bears to extinction.

• Expanded oil and gas leasing on public lands, at lower rates.

• A huge expansion in coal extraction nationwide.

• Create an added cost workaround for NEPA environmental reviews.

• Apply fees to environmental non-profits working to oppose permitting.

• Reduced funding for all land management agencies.

• Mandate expanded timber harvests.

All that is now folded into the larger House budget proposal, which also contains measures that will:

• Increase the cost of borrowing money—the median home loan would go up $600 to $1,240/year.

• Lower wages for working and middle class families.

• Increase the cost of utility bills—average household energy bills would go up $136 next year, while energy efficient home tax credits will go down by $130.

• Make building a new home more expensive—the average cost of building a home will go up $10,900.

• Increase the average car loan payment by $60.

• Increase the cost of gasoline.

• Increase the cost of healthcare while kicking many families off of Affordable Care Act insurance plans.

• Increase the cost of groceries by $1,200/year for the average household.

And all that is being done in order to deliver tax cuts for billionaires and their corporations. What the House is delivering here is a shit sandwich of a budget in which normal Americans will lose access to the places where they hike, hunt, fish, camp, and recreate, the entire country will lose the ecosystem benefits like clean air, clean water, and abundant wildlife provided by those lands, and costs will increase across the entire economy, for everyone. All so the very richest Americans can continue to avoid paying their fair share into the very economy they take so much from.

Top photo: BLM

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.