Congress Is Setting Up for a Public Lands Sell-Off

Americans love their public lands — particularly Americans living in the West, where easy access to the region’s undeveloped forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and lakes is a point of identity and pride. But on Friday, in its first action as a voting body, the House of Representatives for the 119th Congress approved a rules package that reintroduces a provision making it easier for lawmakers to cede control of federal lands to local authorities. That, in turn, could result in vast swaths of the West being opened up to drilling or auctioned off to private owners, according to critics.

“It’s an obscure provision that [Congress] is using to essentially obfuscate the paving of the way towards selling off federal public lands,” Michael Carroll, the BLM Campaign Director at the Wilderness Society, told me of the rulemaking maneuver.

Republicans have tried this before. In 2017, during the party’s trifecta, the House approved a rules package with a near-identical provision that essentially declared that public lands do not have a budgetary value that needs to be accounted for when they’re sold, streamlining potential handovers. New Mexico Democratic Representative Raúl Grijalva described the provision at the time as allowing Congress to “give away every single piece of property we own, for free, and pretend we have lost nothing of any value.”

Utah Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz subsequently attempted to take advantage of the provision by introducing legislation that would have transferred 3 million acres of Western federal land to state control — a bill that was met by so much opposition from hunters, anglers, and his own furious constituents that he ultimately withdrew it.

The provision briefly disappeared from the rules packages of the 116th and 117th Congresses, when the House was controlled by Democrats, then reappeared again in 2023, when Congress was split but the House was in Republican control. But to advocates for public lands, the provision’s inclusion in the 119th Congress’ rules seems like a mere extension and more like a tactical teeing-up for the incoming Republican trifecta. “Utah politicians aren’t stupid. They learn from their mistakes,” Carroll said.

He described an anticipated three-pronged approach to land privatization headed into 2024: the judiciary route, with the Supreme Court poised to decide whether or not to hear a Utah lawsuit over the constitutionality of federal control of BLM lands later thisweek; the legislative route, which began with Friday’s rule package; and the administrative route, with Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who supports Utah’s lawsuit, under a directive to increase drilling. “It’s all backed up by the amount of money that the state of Utah appropriated to support their lawsuit — $20 million that they didn’t have that last time,” Carroll added.

He doesn’t expect Republicans to sit around twiddling their thumbs, either. In 2017, the “Trump administration was pretty new to governing and the levers of power.” He expects in 2024 “we’re going to see, in the next two weeks, legislation that moves to privatize public lands.”

“We need to hear Republicans when they say, ‘Drill, baby drill,’” Carroll went on. “That has real consequences for federal public lands.”