Policy experts see the defunding of land management agencies like the Forest Service as a potential step towards selling off federal public land through legislative action or a way to fund Trump’s idea for a sovereign wealth fund.
The concern around selling federal public land isn’t new, but sources say that this moment feels unprecedented when coupled with mass federal employee firings, like letting go of probationary employees, grant funding freezes and cuts, or states vying to gain control of federal land and cross-governmental support.
Federal public land is a huge asset to rural communities nationwide, particularly in the West. States like Nevada, Utah, and Idaho contain more than 60% federal public land.
Megan Lawson, a researcher at Headwaters Economics, said that losing public land could be a big economic hit for rural gateway communities that depend on access to land for recreation.
“Federal land is good for local economies. It supports jobs and income. It supports diversified economies that help these places be more resilient,” Lawson said. “But all those benefits that come from public land depend on the public having access to it.”
In 2024, the state of Utah filed a lawsuit to return the unappropriated Bureau of Land Management land to the state based on a claim that the federal government does not have the constitutional authority to hold all of the land that it currently owns. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in early January, but Utah is spending more than 2 million dollars, according to open records requests filed by the Salt Lake Tribune, on their “Stand for Our Land” campaign associated with the lawsuit.
Michael Carroll, BLM Campaign Director for the Wilderness Society, sees this as a “targeted campaign to try and popularize this idea of federal public lands being given away. He said that if land was transferred to state control, it would most likely be sold off to developers due to lack of capacity.
“They don’t have the resources to manage it. One bad fire year, and they’re going to find themselves in a situation where they’re bankrupting the state,” Carroll said in a Daily Yonder interview.
In early February of 2025, Wyoming’s state senate also attempted but failed to pass a resolution to transfer federal land to the state. The resolution failed by one vote.
These attempts to transfer federal land to states target mostly unappropriated land — that is land not designated as a national park, national monument or wilderness area. Although the Wyoming Senate Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources committee did vote to have all federal land except Yellowstone National Park returned to the state before the resolution ultimately failed.
“It’s a years-long campaign by anti-federal public lands folks, people who do not like public lands and would like to see them sold off, to break the agencies,” said Carroll. “So fire all the employees so they can’t actually manage the land. Then turn around and say, the federal government and the federal agencies can’t manage the land. You should give it to us in the state or sell it off.”
Despite these campaigns to reduce public support for federal public land, Colorado College released their annual State of the Rockies Conservation in the West report with data showing that Western voters overwhelmingly support public lands. When asked if public land should be sold to develop housing, only 14% of respondents said they would support such an effort.
Drew McConville is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute. McConville has been following public land policy for over 20 years and says that there are a few ways the sell-off could happen. One of these options is through the budget reconciliation process in Congress.
First, the House tweaked the rules package that was passed on the first day of the Congress. On page ten it reads “A bill or resolution…requiring or authorizing a conveyance of Federal land to a State, local government, or tribal entity shall not be considered as providing new budget authority, decreasing revenues, increasing mandatory spending, or increasing outlays.”
This means that giving away federal lands will not affect the federal budget or count as a loss. “It basically equates no value to the federal public lands, which we think is sort of an injustice to those public lands, but it makes it easier for them to give it to municipalities,” said Carroll.
Congress uses a special legislative process called “reconciliation” that allows for budget-related bills to pass with only a simple majority instead of the three-fifths needed to pass most bills. Republicans currently hold 53 Senate seats. This is designed to expedite budget-related legislation, but Hicks said that in a document leaked in mid-January, House Budget Committee Republicans reportedly compiled a list of potential budget cuts including but not limited to selling public land.
Trump’s plan to create a U.S Sovereign Wealth Fund which would require raising trillions of dollars in a short amount of time is another way McConville sees as a possible public land sell-off mechanism.
“There aren’t really a lot of ways that you could quickly amass a huge amount of money other than liquidating assets the government already has,” McConville said. “And if you look at how the Secretary of the Interior talks about public lands, he talks about them as assets.”
During his confirmation hearing with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Doug Bergum, the newly appointed Secretary of the Interior said that “not every acre of federal land is a national park or a wilderness area. Some of those areas we have to absolutely protect for their precious stuff, but the rest of it, this is America’s balance sheet.”
But McConville and other public land advocates see federal public lands, even those not designated as national parks and monuments as more than just an asset to be sold off. “They provide outdoor recreation opportunities for families. They fuel economic growth for nearby communities and outdoor businesses, and this is a bipartisan American tradition to enjoy and steward and pass along America’s public lands,” McConville said.
This story was produced with support from the LOR Foundation. LOR works with people in rural places to improve quality of life.
