No, Yellowstone Is Not Up For Sale, Senator Leading Charged Public Lands Bill Says

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee is working to reassure skeptics who worry that his proposal to sell certain federal lands for housing and community development would usher in a “mass sell-off” of natural wonders treasured by the public.

Lee, Republican Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and others interviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation say those who assert that the proposal would put huge chunks of federal lands up for grabs are misinformed or intentionally spreading false information. The Utah Republican’s public lands measure would notably exempt lands with federal protections, such as national parks, wilderness areas and lands with 13 other federal designations, as well as facilitate the disposal of just over three million acres — just a sliver of less than 1% of federal land. (RELATED: Trump’s Admin Has One Idea That Could Totally Change How Gov’t Uses Federal Land)

“If all I knew about this bill were the falsehoods being circulated by the left, I would hate it too,” Lee told TheBlaze’s Glenn Beck on Thursday morning. The Utah Republican has embarked on a days-long social media campaign to engage the public about his hotly-contested provision within the Senate’s energy and natural resources title of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has floated holding a vote on the Senate’s draft of the president’s tax and spending bill as early as Wednesday while senators continue to hammer out thorny details as the final bill takes shape.

The Utah Republican’s proposal has been plagued by assertions that the provision would jeopardize Americans’ access to beloved federal lands, including areas within national parks. However, Lee says his bill would identify lands with little recreation or conservation value and would maintain the pristine lands that Americans have enjoyed for generations.

“This is not the crown jewel land,” Lee said Thursday. “This is garden variety land. It’s just sitting there vacant where people can and should live.”

Some argue that *all* federally owned land must remain in federal hands—in perpetuity

Why not set aside a fraction of one percent of that land for to make homes more affordable? https://t.co/7ICXVo1mm2

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) June 20, 2025

The provision would grant state and local governments’ the opportunity to buy land up for sale before private bidders, prioritize lands near existing population centers and limit private entities’ ability to buy multiple parcels of land within one sale. The proposal would also require buyers to use the public land with no federal protections for housing or community development purposes. 

The public lands provision also shrinks budget deficits, creating $5 to $10 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Lee has vigorously disputed a Wilderness Society map circulating on social media appearing to show hundreds of millions of acres of federal land that would be listed for sale if Lee’s provision were to be signed into law. He has deemed the groups’s map to be part of a “disinformation campaign” led by a former Biden-era official whom he called a “eco-terrorist” — to tank Trump’s sweeping budget bill.

The Wilderness Society claims that a staggering 250 million acres of public lands will become “eligible for sale” if Trump signs the Lee provision into law. The environmentalist group declines to specify that Lee’s proposal would facilitate the sale of just one half of one percent of federal lands.

The public lands measure requires the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service to identify up to 0.75% of their land holdings across 11 states to be sold for housing and community needs. This would cover no more than 3.3 million acres out of the roughly 640 million acres owned by the federal government.

The Wilderness Society is notably led by former Biden administration BLM Director Tracey Stone-Manning whom Senate Republicans accused of being unfit to serve due to her past involvement in a 1989 eco-terrorism incident. Stone-Manning testified in a 1993 criminal trial that she sent an anonymous and threatening letter to the Forest Service on behalf of her former roommate, a radical environmental activist, to warn that a local Idaho forest had been sabotaged with tree spikes. Though Stone-Manning received legal immunity, her roommate was sentenced to 17 months in prison. 

“I think a lot of this [opposition] is being driven by the far-left and by people like ‘eco-terrorist’ Tracy Stone-Manning, who accept as almost an article of faith that you can’t ever allow any land [to be sold] that is today under the ownership of the US government,” Lee said Thursday. “[It’s] simply illogical, and it’s very unfair to those who live in public landscapes.”

Hageman, Wyoming’s lone House representative, told the Cowboy State Daily that the Wilderness Society map is inaccurate because the depiction conflates the land potentially up for sale in the Lee proposal with unrelated BLM and Forest Service resource management plans.

Myron Ebell, who led the Environmental Protection Agency transition team during Trump’s first term, similarly told the DCNF that the Wilderness Society map “is intended to mislead” viewers by failing to give an accurate picture of the potential land up for sale within Lee’s proposal. The left-wing environmental organization told the Wyoming-based news outlet that they stand by the lands highlighted on their map. 

Ebell conceded that the Wilderness Society map does provide a service to the public by visualizing how much of the West and Alaska is owned by the federal government. He laments the monopolization of federal land west of the Rockies, dubbing Washington an “alien landowner” in states that own less than half of the land within their borders. 

Energy advocate Alex Epstein expressed a similar sentiment to reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday walking out of a closed door lunch-briefing with Republican senators during which he advocated for ending green energy tax breaks enacted under former President Joe Biden. 

“I am generally unsympathetic to the fact that the government has monopolized something like a third of the country and treats it all as a precious national park, which most of it is not,” Epstein said. 

Lee has consistently argued that some federal land that is hard to manage or has little aesthetic or ecological value could play a role in addressing the nationwide shortage of homes, which is especially acute in the West.

Western states are home to some of the fastest growing communities in the country, but are also facing one of the worst affordable housing crises.

This is partly due to environmental constraints that prevent cities, some of which are completely or partially surrounded by land owned by BLM or the Forest Service, from expanding as more out-of-state residents move in, Ebell told the DCNF.

The federal government owns more than 63% of the land in Lee’s home state of Utah where land that can be developed for housing is in short supply. The state is facing a massive housing crunch and is projected to be short of more than 150,000 units by 2030, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. 

“President Trump knows that this is unacceptable, that America should be dealing with such a housing crisis, especially in western states like mine, where there’s a lot of federal land,” Lee said Thursday.

The Trump administration has considered federal land as a potential solution to address housing affordability with federal officials convening a task force in March to identify public lands held by the federal government suitable for housing.

Recent analysis shows that disposing of just a fragment of BLM land could spur the construction of millions of new homes. 

If the BLM were to sell just 0.2% of its land holdings near existing cities, the disposal could result in the construction of 1.5 million new homes, according to a March 2025 analysis by Edward Pinto, American Enterprise Institute Housing Center co-director.

Some voices on the right have argued that the federal government should preserve its 638 million acres of land rather than disposing of small sections to public and private landowners.

“It is clear that selling our public lands would be a betrayal to America and the American people,” environmentalist and author Benji Backer wrote in an op-ed published in the Daily Caller criticizing the Lee provision for proposing to dispose of certain federal lands.

Ebell and Chris Edwards, Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute, suggested this line of thinking is more in step with the left’s preference for consolidating power in Washington. They would prefer state and local governments and private entities to play a greater role in the stewardship of federal lands. 

“Left-wingers love centralization … they want to centralize power in Washington even though it’s obvious that Washington doesn’t work very well,” Edwards told the DCNF in an interview. “I think that’s a giant mistake.”

“The federal land agencies are very poor environmental managers,” Edwards added. “The state and local governments and the private sector can manage land better than the federal government, so the more we transfer and sell back to the states and the private sector, the better.”

Ebell similarly criticized certain Republican lawmakers’ opposition to the Lee provision, dubbing them “land socialists.”

 “They need to be called that,” Ebell said, arguing the Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they knew the federal government owns more than a fourth of the land in the continental United States. “If government owns all the property, then government has all the power.”

It is unclear whether Lee’s proposal to make certain federal lands eligible to be sold for housing and community purposes will be incorporated into the final budget reconciliation bill. Republican Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, who prevented a similar measure from being included in the House-passed bill, has pledged to vote against any bill that contains the Lee provision despite Montana being excluded from the proposal. Zinke previously served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior during Trump’s first administration.

Republican Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch and Montana Sen. Steve Daines have also come out against Lee’s proposal, according to the Idaho-based Lewiston Tribune.

Despite backlash against the proposal from the left and parts of the right, Edwards said Lee’s proposal was refreshing for advancing federalism and private ownership.

“The Republican Party used to believe in devolving power to the states and the private sector, so hopefully Senator Lee’s proposal is maybe a movement back in that direction … a bit of a revival of Reaganesque policymaking,” Edwards said.

“I would see this as a small first step toward reviving federalism and land ownership,” he added.

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