Hunters, ranchers and conservationists spoke up and a proposal to sell 2.2 million to 3.3 million acres of public lands in the western United States was removed from President Donald Trump‘s “big, beautiful bill.”
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican who introduced the bill, admitted that the acreage was too much land to sell before the proposal was removed. Online criticism came from hunters and ranchers who encouraged Lee to remove all U.S. Forest Service Land from consideration.
As reported by the Las Vegas Review Journal, Lee will likely reintroduce revised proposals. The state with the largest percentage of federally-owned public lands is Nevada.
“This is a victory for the American public, who were loud and clear: Public lands belong in public hands, for current and future generations alike. We trust the next politician who wants to sell off public lands will remember that people of all stripes will stand against that idea. Our public lands are not for sale,” former Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement. Stone-Manning led the BLM under the Biden Administration.
While Nevada Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen previously supported the sale of lands to generate local revenue, neither supported Lee’s proposal. Cortez Masto called Lee’s proposal a “nonstarter” and Rosen said it could set a precedent for future public land sales that would not benefit Nevada‘s economy.
“If Senate Republicans push to include future versions of this terrible plan in their extreme tax spending bill, I’ll fight to block it every time,” Rosen said.
The Co-Chairs of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC) Lands, Waters, and Nature Task Force Reps. Doris Matsui of California, Don Beyer of Virginia and Maxine Dexter of Oregon released the following statement in response to Congressional Republicans’ repeated, but ultimately failed, attempts to sell off public lands to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.
“Over the past few weeks, Republicans have learned just how unpopular it is with the American people to sell our treasured public lands to fund tax breaks for the richest people in the country. While the specifics changed across the various proposals, at the core of all of them was a crooked scheme to pull off the largest public lands auction in modern American history. With every failed version, we learned just how relentless Republicans are in their desire to trade away our children’s access to the great American outdoors in exchange for short-term profits that go straight into the pockets of billionaires and big polluters.”
The SEEC is breathing a sigh of relief this week after strong pushback from Americans and Republicans.
“Nevertheless, this dangerous close call once again demonstrates that we cannot take anything for granted so long as President Trump and this Republican Party are in charge, even things as sacrosanct as our public lands,” the SEEC leaders said.
Americans made it clear, for now, that public lands are not for sale. Republicans should learn from the public outcry and reconsider the other destructive and unpopular proposals in the ‘big beautiful big.’
“We urge our counterparts to listen to the families, union workers, business leaders, doctors, faith leaders, and many others who have clearly and repeatedly articulated the massive and unnecessary pain this bill will inflict upon our country,” the SEEC leaders said.
The SEEC is a coalition of 100 members of the U.S. House of Representatives that was founded in January 2009 to be a focused, active, and effective coalition for advancing policies that address climate change, promote clean energy innovation and domestic manufacturing, develop renewable energy resources, create family-sustaining clean jobs, protect our nation’s air, water, and natural environment, and promote environmental justice.
Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), the nation’s leading coalition of outdoor recreation businesses and organizations, commended the bipartisan leadership in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate and the organization’s more than 50 national members who helped keep out the proposal to sell off public lands.
“From the beginning, ORR has stood firmly on shared, bipartisan principles: protecting access to public lands and waters for outdoor recreation, investing in infrastructure, and securing long-term funding for sustainable growth. While we stand ready to work on housing issues that need to be addressed with Congress and the administration, budget reconciliation was the wrong vehicle for deciding the fate of America’s public lands and the $1.2 trillion recreation economy,” the organization said in a statement.
According to ORR, the way Lee was going about selling the land was out of touch with what the public wanted and could have affected businesses, jobs, public health and rural communities that depend on access to outdoor recreation for economic development and quality of life.
“ORR and our members spanning the entire outdoor recreation industry are uniquely positioned to forge innovative, bipartisan solutions to issues impacting our public lands—from housing for our workforce, to funding needed infrastructure, to supporting gateway communities—and keeping public lands and waters accessible and outdoor recreation thriving for generations to come will remain the backbone of this work,” ORR President Jessica Turner said.
The Outdoor Recreation Roundtable represents the more than 110,000 outdoor businesses in the recreation economy and the full spectrum of outdoor-related activities. The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Commerce shows that outdoor recreation generated $1.2 trillion in economic output (2.3% of GDP), 5 million jobs and comprises 3.1 percent of U.S. employees.
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Rebecca Barnabi
