Photo © Nathan St. Andre

In June, Utah Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) launched the latest in a long line of attacks by Utah politicians on America’s public lands. This time the proposal is for a massive public lands sell-off through the complicated congressional budget process known as Budget Reconciliation. While Lee’s goal of upending the very concept of public lands is the same as it ever was, his latest scheme employs new tactics: land sell-offs cloaked in the guise of promoting affordable housing.

Over the past fifteen years in Utah, we have seen numerous attempts to undermine the foundation of our uniquely American public land system. In 2012, the Utah legislature demanded that the United States hand over 31.2 million acres of federal land to the state by 2014. While this was accompanied by plenty of sabre rattling, 2014 came and went and the federal government unsurprisingly did not comply with Utah’s baseless demands.

In 2017, former Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced a bill to sell off millions of acres of public lands across the West. Just two weeks later, after widespread public outcry and backlash from Americans across the political spectrum, Rep. Chaffetz reversed course and “withdrew” the bill, begrudgingly acknowledging the unpopularity of his legislation. He resigned from Congress four months later, just six months into his term.

In 2024, Utah filed a lawsuit at the U.S. Supreme Court to try to force the federal government to sell off or “dispose of” 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM)-managed lands within the state. The Supreme Court declined to take the case, and while Utah has yet to re-file its lawsuit in federal district court, Governor Spencer Cox has said that the state intends to do so.

In recent months these attempts to force the sale of the nation’s public lands have become more frequent and also more sophisticated, with politicians attempting to repackage the sale of public lands into something more palatable. The theme of the moment is for Republicans like Senator Lee to link land sell-off with the need for affordable housing.

It’s important to cut through the rhetoric and see these schemes for what they really are: brazen attempts to sell off lands that belong to all Americans and put them into the hands of private developers. But before we talk about where we are today, it’s useful to look back at how we got here.

The HOUSES Act

Senator Lee’s first attempt to push the sell-off of public lands as a solution to housing issues was the deceptively-named HOUSES Act, which he introduced in 2022. Senator Lee claimed that the bill would help address affordable housing in the West by selling off wide swaths of public land. It would have done nothing of the sort.

Under the HOUSES Act, local and state governments could nominate for sale roughly 200 million acres of public land across the West. The lands identified for sale could include wilderness study areas and areas of critical environmental concern (both protective BLM designations), as well as cultural landscapes and important wildlife habitat. Nominations would have to include a residential development plan, but the bill allowed commercial and industrial development on a portion of the lands.

The bill called for a land sale process that cut out the opportunity for public comment, thus leaving the public out in the cold as the fate of their lands was decided. To make matters worse, after 15 years the privatized public lands could be repurposed for uses other than housing, including golf courses or industrial development.  

What Senator Lee’s HOUSES Act did NOT do is the one thing he touted the most. It didn’t contain any requirement that housing developed on sold-off public lands be affordable and it didn’t adopt any affordable housing requirement. There was also no provision to prevent public lands from being developed into high-end vacation homes, Airbnbs, or luxury housing projects.

The HOUSES Act was never intended to be an affordable housing bill, but rather a hand-out to real estate developers.

Land Sell-Off Via Budget Reconciliation

This brings us to May 2025, when House Republicans tried another tactic to privatize public lands in Utah: mandating a sell-off through the byzantine congressional Budget Reconciliation process. Once again, it was under the guise of affordable housing. At around midnight, at the end of a contentious 13-hour hearing, Representatives Celeste Maloy (R-UT-2) and Mark Amodei (R-NV-2) introduced an amendment to the House version of the Budget Reconciliation Bill that would have sold off over 11,000 acres of BLM lands in Utah (primarily in Washington County, which includes the city of St. George) and nearly 500,000 acres in Nevada.

Rep. Maloy claimed that her public land sell-off was intended to benefit things like affordable housing and infrastructure. However, like Lee’s HOUSES Act, nothing in her amendment required that parcels sold off be used for public purposes and there were no limitations on how the lands could be used once sold. In other words, the land could be developed for golf courses, luxury resorts, strip malls, private vacation homes, or simply flipped for sale again.

This sell-off attempt was ultimately thwarted when the House stripped the amendment from the House Budget Bill.

Unfazed by the failure of the public land sell-off to stick in the House version of the bill, Senator Lee has doubled down in the Senate. In his latest scheme, he has re-packaged and modified his HOUSES Act and is trying to force the sale of millions of acres of public land across 11 western states to fund tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. Lee’s budget provision targets both BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands and mandates the sale of between 2 million and 3 million acres of public land within five years.

While Senator Lee is once again touting his bill as a way to promote affordable housing, it will in fact do no such thing. Lee’s bill contains no provision requiring affordable housing and would sell off public lands at a substantial discount. As with his HOUSES Act, Lee is attempting to sell off lands that belong to all Americans to benefit wealthy developers and donors.

As of the time of publication, Senator Lee’s sell-off provision is still in the Senate version of the Budget Bill. Public land lovers across the country and across the political spectrum are fighting hard to get it out. We hope to be able to report good news on that front in the next newsletter.  [UPDATE: After tremendous pushback from across the country, Senator Lee pulled his sell-off provision on June 29th. Read SUWA’s press release for additional details.]

Why the Sudden Interest in Affordable Housing?

Attempts to sell off the nation’s public lands are deeply unpopular. Polling has repeatedly shown that Americans—especially Westerners—strongly believe in keeping public lands in public hands and reject any efforts that would lead to the sale of these shared and cherished lands. Politicians know that and are desperately trying to re-package the public lands sell-off to seem less threatening.

What makes such unpopular proposals seem potentially palatable is that they capitalize on a real issue: housing affordability and availability. But can federal land sell-offs really help with affordable housing issues? According to a recently-released report from the Center for American Progress—Will the U.S. Housing Crisis be Exploited for a Massive Public Lands Sell-Off?—the answer is largely no. While there are limited instances where small, targeted land transfers with clear affordable housing assurance and appropriate legal guardrails could be helpful, it is not a solution in and of itself. Any limited transfers must also be part of a more comprehensive approach to addressing housing needs.

The reality is that the vast majority of public lands are remote and entirely unsuitable for housing development. For the rare circumstances where public lands could be a tool to help with housing, there are provisions in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the Recreation and Public Purposes Act that allow the BLM to facilitate targeted land transfers and sales to address the needs of local communities.

It’s no coincidence that sweeping land transfer proposals under the guise of housing are coming from Utah Republicans who have made their intense hostility toward public lands clear. It’s also telling that these proposals are never accompanied by any meaningful solutions to the affordability crisis: things like expanded housing assistance payments and regulatory reform to increase developable land within communities. They are not real proposals to address a pressing issue, but just the latest attempt to make a deeply unpopular proposition seem reasonable.

Selling off public lands is short-sighted, self-serving, and irreversible. Public lands belong to all Americans, not to the highest bidder at the whims of a political agenda. Once they’re sold, they’re gone for good—fences go up, access disappears, and they are lost to the public forever.

As attacks on public lands continue, it’s important to stay vigilant and hold politicians accountable. This is a big part of SUWA’s daily work, and your support makes it all possible. For breaking news and action opportunities, please join our email list at suwa.org/stayinformed or follow us on social media.

—Laura Peterson

The above article first appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of our Redrock Wilderness newsletter. Become a member to receive our print newsletter in your mailbox 3 times a year.