Republicans Aim to Generate Support for Selling Off America’s Public Lands

Trump signed a frenzy of executive orders aimed at boosting drilling, mining and other development across the federal lands.Walter G Arce/ASP/ZUMA

This story was originally published on the substack Public Domain to which you can subscribe here.

The last time Republicans took full control of Washington, DC, back in 2017, the House of Representatives quickly approved a rules change making it easier for Congress to sell off federal public lands. Then-Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) followed up with legislation to liquidate 3.3 million acres of public land in 10 Western states that he said had “been deemed to serve no purpose for taxpayers.”

That effort to pilfer public lands failed abysmally.

Less than two weeks after introducing the bill, Chaffetz withdrew it in response to fierce public backlash. Public land advocates who successfully rallied to defeat the bill spent the next four years pointing to it as a warning sign of how extremist some Republicans had become on the issue. Trump and his GOP allies largely backed away from attempting to sell off public lands or transfer control of them to states, realizing that doing so was a non-starter with most voters. Instead, they turned to savvier tactics to achieve some of the pro-development goals that are the foundation of the anti-federal land movement.

If Trump’s first term triggered a slow thaw for public land protections, his return all but promises a flood. Six weeks into his second term, Trump has already unleashed a far-reaching broadside against federal public land management. And this time around, a growing number of Republicans are trying to push their vision for pawning off the public domain into the conservative mainstream.

Like in 2017, Republicans have a trifecta in Washington. Trump is moving rapidly to dismantle federal land management agencies and fossilize US energy policy, leaning into the idea that voters gave him a mandate to enact dramatic change. The new House rules package, adopted in early January, resurrected the very provision that led to Chaffetz’s unpopular bill, once again teeing up future transfer and sale of federal lands. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states like Utah and Wyoming, empowered by Trump’s reelection, are advancing far-reaching anti-federal land policies.

Land Tawney, a longtime public lands advocate and former president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, told Public Domain the assault on public lands is worse than he’s ever seen. “This playbook, in my mind, is to dismantle, divest, and then privatize,” he said.

Tawney recently formed a new advocacy group, American Hunters and Anglers Action Network, to provide a more progressive voice in the sporting community and try to rebuild a 2017-style coalition to combat the current attack on public lands.

“A majority of people, man, are sticking their heads in the sand and being like, ‘I’m just going to try to wait it out for four years,’” he said. “Waiting it out for four years with the administration, waiting it out for four years with Congress—we’re going to lose big time.”

Starting on his first day in office last month, Trump signed a frenzy of executive orders aimed at boosting drilling, mining and other development across the federal estate, as well as rolling back environmental regulations. The Republican Party platform, adopted in July and endorsed by Trump, floats the idea of using “limited” federal lands to build more affordable housing—an idea endorsed by those pushing to transfer federal lands to states. And Trump recently ordered the creation of a sovereign wealth fund, which the left-leaning Center for American Progress warned could “make selling out and selling off public lands irresistible.”

Trump’s interior secretary, billionaire businessman and former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, has described federal lands other than protected sites like national parks, national monuments or wilderness areas as “America’s balance sheet”—assets that he argues Americans are getting a “low return” on, despite public lands serving as the backbone of an outdoor recreation industry that generates more than $1 trillion in economic output annually.

“We’ve got 500 million acres of land that are in public hands that were put away for the benefit and the use of the American public,” Burgum said during an address to the National Congress of American Indians earlier this month. “The [Bureau of Land Management] lands, the US Forest Service lands, all the lands that are out there. Some of that land is inhospitable and un-occupiable, but underneath that it has value…whether it’s critical minerals, whether it’s energy resources, whether it’s using that for wind or solar…these land resources are huge.”

Burgum’s comments make clear that he and Trump plan to dismantle the balance between development and conservation that the Biden administration tried to bring to federal land management. In its place, they’re pushing an exploitation-first agenda that disregards the role of public land in protecting critical ecosystems for thousands of animal and plant species and jeopardizes the myriad climate, environmental and public health benefits protected landscapes provide.

The Interior Department did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment.

As part of its “drill, baby, drill” agenda, the Trump administration has signaled its plans to dismantle national monuments and other protected landscapes, as it did during Trump’s first term. In a secretarial order on “unleashing American energy” that Burgum signed in early February, he directed his assistant secretaries to “review and, as appropriate, revise all withdrawn public lands,” including national monument designations and mineral bans.

During his first term, Trump carved more than 2 million acres from two national monuments in Utah: Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. It was the largest rollback of federal land protections in U.S. history.

The White House’s reprioritization of industry over conservation on federal public land is perhaps best highlighted by Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Earlier this month, Trump tapped longtime fossil fuel lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma to direct BLM, which is part of the Interior Department and oversees more federal acres than any other agency.

Sgamma is president of Western Energy Alliance, a Colorado-based oil and gas industry trade group, and co-authored an energy section of Project 2025, the 900-page policy blueprint that MAGA operatives compiled to guide a future Republican administration and that Trump has repeatedly worked to distance himself from. The Interior Department chapter of the manifesto, which Sgamma contributed to, was authored by William Perry Pendley, who served as BLM’s acting director during Trump’s first term and has spent decades advocating for federal lands to be sold and transferred.

Trump and his allies are pushing an “all-of-government approach to selling off and privatizing our public lands,” Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, said in an interview.

Leading that effort at the state level is Utah, which has a long history of trying to wrest control of public lands from the federal government. Back in August, Republican officials in Utah filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court arguing it was unconstitutional for the federal government to retain ownership of so-called “unappropriated” lands—those not designated as a national park or for some other specific purpose. The lawsuit has been described as a “Hail Mary.” Afterall, when Utah became a state, it agreed to “forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within [its] boundaries”—the very lands it now claims as its own.

Several Republican-led states and right-wing organizations threw their support behind Utah’s legal effort. In one friend of the court brief, Sen. Mike Lee (R) and the rest of Utah’s congressional delegation argued that the existence of federal lands within Utah’s border leave the state effectively “occupied” and that “if anything would justify war, it is one country’s continued occupation of another.” Lee, a loyal Trump ally and longtime opponent of federal public lands, now chairs the powerful Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The Utah lawsuit asked the US Supreme Court directly to strip more than 18 million acres of BLM lands in the state from the federal government. The conservative-majority high court declined to hear the case in January, but Utah officials have signaled that they are likely to refile the case in a federal court.

Utah is “heartened to know the incoming Administration shares our commitments to the principle of ‘multiple use’ for these federal lands and is committed to working with us to improve land management,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) and other state leaders said in a statement responding to the Supreme Court ruling. “We will continue to fight to keep public lands in public hands because it is our stewardship, heritage and home.”

Utah is repurposing a slogan long used by public land advocates—“keep public lands in public hands”—to advance its land transfer agenda is part of what Carroll and Steve Bloch, legal director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, see as a coordinated propaganda campaign. The state spent millions of taxpayer dollars promoting its legal effort, including erecting billboards that read: “Stand for our Land—Let Utah Manage Utah Land.”

While Utah officials are publicly saying they want only for those acres to be transferred to state control, court filings lay bare the state’s clear intent to privatize those lands, Bloch said.

In a motion responding to a lawsuit that the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance filed challenging the constitutionality of Utah’s public lands litigation, attorneys for the state wrote that Utah’s action “does not claim Utah owns or otherwise has title to those lands, nor does it demand that the federal government transfer ownership of these lands to the State of Utah.” Instead, Utah seeks only “to compel the United States to fulfill its constitutional obligations to dispose of unappropriated federal land,” the motion stated.

Bloch said Utah is trying to “muddy the water” and hide that the goal of its legal effort is to have federal lands sold off. “When they say, ‘Oh let Utah be in charge of it,’ they’re really saying, ‘Once it’s sold off and privatized, Utah policies that are really pro-development, pro-fossil fuels, pro-extraction, pro-tract housing, strip malls, mansions—that will be what’s leading the way,’” Bloch said.

Utah working to seize federal lands is nothing new. This time, however, it has an ally at the helm of the Interior Department. During Burgum’s tenure as North Dakota governor, the state filed a friend of the court brief in support of Utah’s attempted land grab. Carroll argues that alone should have disqualified Burgum from being confirmed as Interior secretary. And yet, when Burgum appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee for his confirmation hearing, no one asked him about North Dakota’s support for the Utah lawsuit.

More recently, Republican state senators in Wyoming tried to one-up Utah, pushing a resolution that demanded Congress turn over every acre of federal land within Wyoming’s border, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park, to the state. The initial resolution covered more than 30 million acres, including Grand Teton National Park, Devils Tower National Monument and all national forests. The full state Senate killed the measure on procedural grounds after a deadlocked vote on Feb. 10.

The Utah and Wyoming land transfer efforts are occurring as the Trump administration is in the process of firing thousands of civil servants at federal land management agencies. Republicans have spent decades trying to reduce funding for federal agencies, while simultaneously arguing that those agencies have done a poor job of managing public lands.

“Reduction in the federal workforce, these mass-firings, this dismantling of agencies, is a part of the game,” Bloch said. “If you break these agencies that are tasked with managing federal lands, you’ve made it much easier to push the argument that states will do better — even if that’s not really what you mean… You mean they should be sold off.”

It is part of a multi-prong approach to undermining the public domain.

By tying federal land sales to America’s housing crisis, a growing number of Republicans hope to make an unpopular idea more palatable. They’re betting that if the public continuously hears that the federal government is doing a bad job of managing federal lands, people will wonder if states are better equipped. And if Utah residents keep seeing billboards falsely claiming that the millions of acres of BLM land in the state are “Utah land,” they might just believe it.

“Montana has managed our lands effectively and responsibly, but the feds have not done the same,” Gianforte wrote in a social media post, linking to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which Terry Anderson, a longtime supporter of privatizing federal lands, called on billionaire Elon Musk and Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to take a “sharp knife to land management agencies” and “turn ownership of some federal lands over to the states.”

Gianforte has a history of advocating for transferring federal lands to states and once sued the state of Montana to block river access on his property near Bozeman. But as recently as October, during his successful campaign for reelection, Gianforte told voters he believed that “public lands belong in public hands.”

His post boosting Anderson’s pro-transfer commentary came one day before hundreds of Montanans rallied at the state capitol in Helena in support of safeguarding public lands. The state legislature is expected to take up its own resolution supporting Utah’s anti-federal land lawsuit and a bill introduced last month in the state Senate proposes selling off as much as 126,000 acres of state trust land for homesteading.

A survey of Western state voters published Feb. 19 confirms that Republicans are wading into dangerous waters. Colorado College’s 15th annual “Conservation in the West” poll found that 72 percent of voters in eight Western states support public lands conservation over increased energy development—the highest level of support in the poll’s history. It also found that 65 percent of respondents oppose giving states control over federal public lands, up from 56 percent in 2017.

Carroll likened the current GOP playbook to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. “They’re literally trying to move the window of what’s acceptable in terms of privatization and sell off of public lands,” he said. “It’s all trying to just socialize this and try to make this stuff sound less extreme.”

Tawney agrees. “The damage is less what happens in the short term—it’s winning the hearts and minds,” he said.

Public land owners, particularly the sporting, environmental and outdoor recreation communities, have begun pushing back against the current GOP attack on America’s shared resources, holding public land rallies at state capitols and turning out at national parks to protest federal workforce cuts.

What ultimately comes of this new chapter in a longstanding fight remains to be seen. For now, the GOP’s gloves are off and the future of public lands, waters and wildlife hangs in the balance.