The Sale of Public Land

Reason should rule the day

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and yes, that is its real name, is a massive bill. It addresses how social security is taxed, Medicaid requirements, clean energy subsidies, and many other issues. On May 22nd, it narrowly passed in the House of Representatives on a near party-line vote. It now moves to the Senate, where it faces significant headwinds. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the OBBBA. For one, it needlessly increases the deficit by randomly giving handouts to different groups, such as tipped employees (I wrote about that here), without any underlying rationale. However, the Senate is attempting to add a provision to the OBBBA that I like: the sale of public lands.

This is an unpopular position. Whether it’s the tundra of Alaska, the desert of Utah, or the scrubland of Nevada, any mention of selling public lands is meant with universal howls from the left and mixed howls from the right. People immediately imagine a national park being sold to a mining company, or worse yet, Disney. They believe that the sale of any public land will devolve into a massive land grab that results in nothing more than factories and gated communities. The reality is far different.

First, federally-owned land in the United States is widely misunderstood. People imagine federal land to be national parks and federally protected wilderness. This is like thinking most American cities have an NFL team. The cities that get the most attention have NFL teams, but there are hundreds, if not thousands of cities in the US. Only 30 have an NFL team. The same is true with public lands. A small percentage of public lands are the beautiful or historic areas people associate with federal management. These are areas like Yellowstone National Park, Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and Grant’s Tomb. Places that are visited by millions of Americans every year. These wilderness areas are in the minority. The vast majority of public lands, over 80 percent, are not wilderness areas. They are still somewhat protected but fall under the domain of agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or the US Forest Service (USFS).

Second, most people have no idea what the BLM or USFS do. Especially with the latter, the common, but incorrect, belief, is that these government agencies are devoted to conservation. There are US agencies devoted to conservation, but those are the agencies that oversee wilderness areas, such as the National Park Service and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The BLM and USFS, and this is crucial, are management agencies. Their job is the manage the various potential uses of the land. This includes recreation and conservation but also exploitation and development. Many Americans would be upset to hear that the USFS was allowing a private company to cut down trees in a national forest, despite this being the agency’s original purpose! The agency was founded to manage logging and mining operations. It isn’t housed within the Department of Agriculture for nothing. The BLM has a similar goal. These agencies are not supposed to steward the land and preserve it for the use of future generations. That’s what the National Park Service is for.

So yes, not only does logging occur on public lands, but hundreds of thousands of acres are cleared every year. And this is fine! It’s done responsibly. All that wood goes to building the houses and furniture and paper straws that American society needs to avoid falling into societal chaos. Not only logging takes place on public lands. Hundreds of mines are currently operating as well, mostly on BLM land. Then there are the thousands of ranchers who use public land for grazing purposes. And how about those ski resorts? Vail, home of the $299 lift ticket, is located in White River National Forest in Colorado. So are eleven other ski areas.

In short, public lands are not conservation areas. Far from it. They are governmentally managed areas. A minority has been set aside for recreation and preservation. The rest are developed to varying extents.

These land holdings are massive. The two largest agencies, The USFS and BLM, manage roughly 438 million acres. Add in several other agencies, and the federal government owns about 640 million acres or about 30 percent of the country. These holdings have an absurdly unequal distribution. In states like Iowa, Kansas, or Connecticut, less than 1 percent of all land is owned by the feds. As you head west, those percentages get larger. 4.8 percent of Tennessee, 6.8 percent of Minnesota, 9.4 percent of Arkansas. In the West, the federal government rules supreme. 36.2 percent of Colorado, 45.4 percent of California, and 63.1 of Utah are federally owned. The insanity peaks in Nevada, where 80.1 percent of the land is owned by the feds. To put that number in context, in the District of Columbia, you know, that city whose whole existence is to service the government of the United States, only 24.7 percent is managed by the federal government. The map at the top of this post gives a great visual of the disparity.

The Senate plan is to sell between 0.5-0.75 percent of those 428 million acres, or between 2.1 and 3.2 million acres. The reaction has been largely negative. Partisans are accusing the bill’s sponsors of wanting to sell off the birthright of all Americans to the highest bidder. Reading through the text of the bill, this is straight-up fearmongering. First, protected lands, that is, lands that are designated for recreation and conservation, cannot be sold. Second, states and local governments can nominate the lands that should be sold. Third, land that is adjacent to developed areas is prioritized.

On top of that, any land sold must be used for housing. No one needs to worry about a mountain top being lopped off for a mine or the forest behind a neighborhood being turned into a factory. Far from it. Millions of acres will be opened up to housing, something our nation desperately needs. As I’ve said before, to tackle America’s housing problem, we must allow developers to build, and they must be allowed to build either out or up. Land that abuts existing development is the perfect place to start. Will this solve the housing problem? Absolutely not. But it is a step in the right direction.

The opposition to this bill is also another form of status quo bias, that is, bias towards keeping things the same. Consider those 11 ski resorts in White River National Forest. If the government announced they were going to auction two more areas off to be developed into ski resorts, people would go berserk. There would be protests about selling off public land to cater to the wealthy and privileged. Perversely, the opposite is also impossible to imagine. If the USFS were to announce that Vail and Aspen Mountain’s use permit was being revoked, and the land would be restored to natural wilderness, people would also be mostly against it. In fact, I suspect some of the same people would be outraged in both cases. We must escape status quo bias. There’s no reason to think the optimal number of ski resorts till the rapture is the number that existed in 1980.

The same goes for housing development. The lands that are federally owned versus privately owned were not the result of a deliberate process. Far from it. Much of BLM land was land nobody wanted, land that no one settled during the early days of western expansion. In the intervening centuries, the relative value of land has changed dramatically. Some areas that were valuable in 1890 no longer are. Other areas that nobody wanted in 1890 would be developed in a heartbeat if privately owned. We should let that happen.