Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah announced over the weekend he was removing a provision from the Senate’s “big, beautiful bill” that would allow the sale of hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands for affordable housing and infrastructure.
“Because of the strict constraints of the budget reconciliation process, I was unable to secure clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families—not to China, not to BlackRock, and not to any foreign interests,” Lee said in a statement announcing the withdrawal of the provision.
After the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s original proposal, which encompassed millions of acres, would violate budget reconciliation rules, he had reduced the acreage. The bill, which contains President Trump’s tax cuts, border and defense initiatives, is being considered under the special rules because it requires only a simple majority to pass, rather than the 60-vote super majority that is required for consideration of most legislation in the Senate.
Under Lee’s plan, land in 11 Western states from Alaska to New Mexico would have been eligible for sale. Montana was carved out of the proposal after its lawmakers objected. In states like Utah and Nevada, the government controls the vast majority of lands, protecting them from potential exploitation but hindering growth.
Lee’s revised plan would have excluded all U.S. Forest Service land from possible sale. Sales of sites controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management were to be significantly reduced, Lee said, so that only land within 5 miles of population centers could be sold.
But in addition to opposition from Democrats, Republican senators in Idaho and Montana objected to the plan, too. Several House Republicans also said that if the provision were included in the Senate bill, they would vote against it when the bill received a vote in the lower chamber, threatening its passage.
Lee said in his statement that he still believes the federal government “owns far too much land—land it is mismanaging and in many cases ruining for the next generation” and he complained that under Democratic presidents, “massive swaths of the West are being locked away from the people who live there, with no meaningful recourse.”
The House originally had a public land sales provision, too, one which would have allowed sales of acreage in Utah and Nevada. But GOP Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as interior secretary during President Trump’s first administration, opposed the idea immediately.
“I do not support the widespread sale or transfer of public lands,” Zinke said in a statement in May. “Once the land is sold, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land.”
Several other Western state Republican House members also rejected the idea, so the provision was stripped out of the budget bill before the House voted on it.
Housing advocates have cautioned that federal land is not universally suitable for affordable housing. Some of the parcels up for sale in Utah and Nevada under the House proposal were many miles from developed areas.
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, said before Lee withdrew his plan that it would exclude Americans from places where they fish, hunt and camp.
“I don’t think it’s clear that we would even get substantial housing as a result of this,” Heinrich said earlier this month. “What I know would happen is people would lose access to places they know and care about and that drive our Western economies.”
