Braxton Taylor
Less than 48 hours after public land advocates celebrated the absence of land sales in the House budget proposal, the Natural Resources Committee amended the legislation to include it.
The amendment wasn’t introduced until the very end of a marathon markup day in which committee members jockeyed to finalize their portion of the budget reconciliation package. Around 11:30 p.m. last night, Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah proposed adding a requirement to sell tens of thousands–potentially hundreds of thousands–of acres in their respective states.
In their presentations to the committee, Amodei and Maloy characterized the sales as generating revenue for state and federal governments, addressing housing shortages, and being in line with previous land disposals.
“Nevada population centers are all encumbered by federal land that can’t meet their housing and development needs without disposal of federal lands,” Amodei said of the Nevada acreage. “Unlike most other states, Nevadans rely on Congress to make those lands available.”
Democrats on the committee took issue with the last-minute nature of the amendment, which came 12 hours into the hearing and gave them little time to consider it before voting for or against it.
“This is just some truly odious sausage at 11:20 p.m. at the end of a long markup,” committee ranking member Jared Huffman said. “Any member of Congress that votes for this is just surrendering any semblance of good process, the integrity of the legislative process is dead if you do this.”
Others pointed out that previous reports of adding land sales to the budget proposal turned out to be true after all: “We’ve been making the case that the Republican reconciliation bill plans to sell off our public lands, and lo and behold, at 11 o’clock, we finally get an amendment that does precisely what this bill would do,” observed Rep. Joe Neguse.
A spokesperson for Rep. Bruce Westerman, the chairman of the House Natural Resources committee, pushed back against these characterizations of the amendment.
“This amendment was the product of community-driven efforts by six western counties,” a spokesperson for his office said in an email to MeatEater. “The sales from these small parcels of land will generate significant federal revenue, and have broad local support. It’s a tailored, parochial budgetary measure.”
Public land advocates are speaking out about the way this legislation would hijack the normal process for disposing of federal lands.
“Decades ago, Congress established reasonable procedures to facilitate appropriate land sales that involve local and national stakeholders in the process,” said David Willms, associate vice president of public lands at the National Wildlife Federation. “This sell-off amendment breaks three social contracts Congress made with the public: that public lands should remain in public hands, with very few exceptions; that when one of those exceptions does apply, the government needs to do so with a process that includes ample public input; and that if land is sold, proceeds should be reinvested in improving public lands and public access.”
Specifically, Willms noted that while the normal process for selling public land generates revenue for the Bureau of Land Management to purchase acreage elsewhere, this amendment puts the money from land sales right back into the U.S. Treasury.
“This amendment bypasses that existing process. Not a dollar would go back into public lands management. It would all go back into the general treasury,” Willms said.
That point was echoed by Devin O’Dea, Western Policy and Conservation Manager for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
“The Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act was established so that any sale of federal lands would serve the public interest, with proceeds used to acquire high-priority conservation lands,” he said. “This last-minute maneuver violates that principle and sets a dangerous precedent that could very easily pave the way for larger-scale land disposals in the future.”
The amendment also includes mandated time frames for completing the sales, which isn’t part of the normal land disposal process.
“Mandating that those sales happen in that accelerated timeframe reduces the opportunity for the public to engage in that process, Willms noted.
The amendment names specific parcels in Utah that total about 10,000 acres, but it does not do the same for the land sales in Nevada. Those parcels could push the total sales above 100,000 acres, Willms said.
“I haven’t talked to anybody who’s been able to figure out the exact number of acres involved in this,” he said. “It’s at least tens of thousands. You start adding it up, and I’ve heard totals of 40,000, 70,000, 350,000. There’s squishy language in the amendment.”
These land sales are far from becoming law, though passage in the House Natural Resources Committee is a major step forward. The complete budget package will have to be approved by the full House, and then it moves to the Senate, where more amendments might be introduced. In the end, both the House and Senate have to agree on a bill before it’s sent to the president.
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