New Map Shows Public Land For Sale Under Senate Budget Reconciliation Bill
The Senate Republican budget reconciliation draft proposes selling off millions of acres of federal public lands in the West to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, multimillionaires, and corporations.
Senate Republicans are resorting to numerous disgusting proposals to paper over their proposed trillions in tax cuts that primarily benefit the rich: kicking more than 10 million poor and working class people off of Medicaid, slashing food assistance funding to help low income people pay for their groceries, gutting clean energy projects that are delivering jobs and economic benefits all over the country, firing hundreds of thousands of public employees that provide necessary services and research that we all depend on.
Senate Republicans are also proposing to sell off more than 3 million acres of federal public land in order to partially “pay for” their debt-and-deficit exploding tax cuts. The Senate reconciliation package, in the words of Senator Mike Lee’s (R-UT) Republican Energy and Natural Resources Committee: “Requires the prudent sale of certain Bureau of Land Management and National Forest System land for housing, increased timber sales, geothermal leasing, and compensation of states and localities for the cost of wind and solar projects on federal land.”
What parcels of public land are potentially on the auction block?
A new map published by the Wilderness Society documents which tracts of public land could be for sale. The potential sale area includes a vast area of over 250 million acres in 11 states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. (NOTE—Montana is exempt from the proposed public land selloff due to resistance from the state’s Republican Representatives and Senators who oppose the sale. See, Republicans, speaking out works!!!)
You can access the Wilderness Society map HERE. U.S. Forest Service land is shown in green. Bureau of Land Management parcels are shown in gold.
Specific acreages by state and agency are listed in the following table:
The Wilderness Society says that the proposed public land selloff is especially dangerous given the other provisions within the Senate reconciliation package that would: “mandate oil lease sales in the Arctic Refuge, force construction of a mining road through a national park and more than double the amount of logging in western national forests.”
From gutting health care to paying for food to public land critical to rural economies in the West, it appears that Republicans will stop at nothing to pay for tax cuts for oligarchs. This is what amounts to “leadership” in President Donald Trump’s America.
The Cocklebur covers rural policy and politics from a progressive point-of-view. Our work focuses on a tangled rural political reality of dishonest debate, economic and racial disparities, corporate power over our democracy, and disinformation peddled by conservative media outlets. We aim to use facts, data, and science to inform our point-of-view. We wear our complicated love/WTF relationship with rural America on our sleeve.