Senate Announces Plan to Sell At Least 2,100,000 Acres of Public Lands
The time to contact your Senators is now.
Today, June 11, 2025, the Senate’s Energy & Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), published its budget reconciliation text.
About halfway down the 69-page document is language that should alarm all public lands lovers to their very core.
Alarm bells should—and will—be going off all over the country right now.
After the House removed provisions to sell about half of million acres of public lands in their own reconciliation text earlier, the Senate has put it back in. And it’s much, much worse.
Here’s the text:
“[T]he Secretary shall select for disposal not less than 0.50 percent and not more than 0.75 percent of Bureau of Land Management land, and shall dispose of all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to those tracts selected for disposal under this section; and”
“[T]he Secretary of Agriculture (acting through the Chief of the Forest Service) shall select for disposal not less than 0.50 percent and not more than 0.75 percent of National Forest System land, and shall dispose of all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to those tracts selected for disposal under this section.”
If that doesn’t seem like a whole lot, let’s look at the actual acreage of public lands the Senate proposes to sell.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages about 245 million acres of public lands. So, selling off between 0.50 and 0.75 percent amounts to a total of 1,225,000 to 1,837,500 acres of BLM lands.
In the case of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), which manages 193 million acres of public lands, that effectively means the selling of between 965,000 and 1,447,500 acres of national forest land.
Adding this all up, the budget proposal from the Senate’s Energy & Natural Resources Committee means that we’ll loose at least—at minimum—2,190,000 acres of public lands.
At the higher end of this proposal, we stand to lose a mindboggling—almost unimaginable—3,285,000 acres of public lands.
This is absolutely massive.
These sell-offs could occur across as many as twelve western states. The budget proposal document identifies the following states as “eligible” for public lands sales:
Alaska
Arizona
California
Colorado
Idaho
Nevada
New Mexico
Oregon
Utah
Washington
Wyoming
These are, in effect, all western states, with the noteworthy exception of Montana, whose Senators Daines and Sheehy have publicly said they oppose the selling of public lands—but only in their own state, I guess.
The Committee’s chairman, Mike Lee, who’s previously said he wants to sell all public lands, made the following statement: “This is President Trump’s agenda: cut the Green New Scam, reduce the deficit, and unleash American energy. We’re cutting billions in unused Biden-era climate slush funds, opening up energy and resource development, turning federal liabilities into taxpayer value, while making housing more affordable for hardworking American families. This is how we make government smaller, freer, and work for Americans.”
The budget proposal also includes oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), restores coal leasing activities, and the 24-mile Ambler Road, a mining road through public lands in Alaska, including Gates of the Arctic National Park.
If there was ever a time to call or email your Senators and raise your opposition to public lands sales, this is it.
This is that moment.
You can find your legislators phone number here on the 5Calls website.
You can conveniently send a message to Congress via one of these forms on the National Parks Conservation Association website.