Mike Lee’s Public Lands Sell-Off Proposal Adds Insult to Wealth Transfer Injury

By Dave Levitan | June 18, 2025 | 9:52am

Screenshot via Energy GOP

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Mike Lee’s Public Lands Sell-Off Proposal Adds Insult to Wealth Transfer Injury

It has been said many times now that the Big Dumb Ugly Bill, in either its passed House or still-under-contentious-negotiation Senate versions, would represent the single largest upward transfer of wealth in American history. The extension of tax cuts benefiting the rich mixed with Medicaid cuts and a thousand other provisions in very real dollar terms would take money from regular people and give it to a select few. But Republicans don’t just want your money; they want your land, too.

Utah Senator Mike Lee, recently in the news for some remarkable dipshittery surrounding the assassinations in Minnesota, is among those proposing to include a sell-off of between 2.2 and 3.3 million acres of public lands in the west. That’s land that belongs to all of us, to be served up at cut-rate prices to, one imagines, Mike Lee’s friends and supporters.

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A budget blueprint would require the sale of 0.5 to 0.75 percent of both Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land. This is supposed to happen fast: within 60 days of the bill’s passage the secretaries of the Interior (BLM) and Agriculture (Forest Service) are required to put up the first acres for sale, and then the next within another 60 days, and so on until they sell out. Those two entities collectively manage more than 400 million acres, and by some analyses the Connecticut-sized sale can be carved out of about 250 million of those acres — basically at the discretion of those secretaries, oil enthusiast Doug Burgum and Brook Rollins, without time or provision for much public input at all.

The supposed purpose is to let developers build housing — in a statement, Lee said the move would turn “federal liabilities into taxpayer value, while making housing more affordable for hardworking American families.” Only, the bill’s proposed wording says the land must be used for that or “any associated community needs.” Given that the same blueprint also features the general Trump administration lodestar of expanding oil and gas leasing, and such “community needs” do not appear all that well defined… well, one wonders.

And what does this potential sell-off of, per the non-profit Wilderness Society, “recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors,” actually get us, beyond theoretical housing and likely oil and gas development? Between $5 and $10 billion of income to the federal government, between 2025 and 2034. In the $3.4-trillion-added-to-the-debt ocean this bill is swimming in, that’s chickenfeed. Couch cushion money.

“From the moment public land sales originally made it into the House budget reconciliation bill via shady last-minute amendment, it has been clear lawmakers know such proposals are deeply unpopular,” said the Wilderness Society’s Michael Carroll, in a statement. “Public land sales only have a prayer of being signed into law if they’re hidden or misrepresented to the American people in some way, which is why Mike Lee has been depicting this as an effort to lightly trim our Forest Service and BLM lands at the margins.”

The Senate bill is far from a done deal, and there are already clear cracks developing in the broader GOP coalition both in the fights over this legislation as well as plenty of other Trump administration policies and moves. Democrats in the Senate are also strongly opposed, for what that’s worth — Martin Heinrich, of New Mexico, the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that Lee chairs, said in a statement that the selloff “isn’t about building more housing or energy dominance. It’s about giving their billionaire buddies YOUR land and YOUR money.”

It’s that double slap to the face that stings here — selling off public lands, one of America’s greatest assets, doesn’t help pay for a giveaway to the rich, not in any real sense. It is a giveaway to the rich.

“Senate Republicans think they can get away with taking a sledgehammer to our national public lands, killing thousands of American jobs, and jacking up families’ electricity costs without being held accountable,” Heinrich said. “To hell with that.”