Mike Lee defends public lands sale proposal, says ‘falsehoods’ have driven opposition

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Sen. Mike Lee is defending his proposal to sell off up to 3 million acres of public lands, saying pushback is driven by “falsehoods being circulated by the left.”

His proposal, unveiled last weekend, identifies more than 250 million acres of land eligible for sale as part of the Senate’s tax and budget package — of which 2 million to 3 million acres across 11 Western states will actually be sold. Lee has said the parcels will be used for housing development and told Glenn Beck on Thursday the proposal will make homeownership for young Americans more affordable.

Related: Mike Lee reportedly trying to bring back sale of Utah public lands in ‘big beautiful bill’

“If all I knew about this bill were the falsehoods being circulated by the left, I’d hate it too,” Lee said on the Glenn Beck Program. “What we’re dealing with is an entire generation of Americans that will fail to launch if we can’t bring the train of homeownership back within reach. … Meanwhile, the federal government owns 640 million acres of land, nearly a third of all land in the United States. The vast majority of that land has zero recreational value. Disposing of a fraction of 1% of that so that the next generation can afford a home is a common-sense solution to a national problem.”

Lee has proposed similar solutions in the past, sponsoring the HOUSES Act to facilitate the sale of federal lands to state or local governments to address housing supply, though that bill has not been passed. His latest proposal directs the cabinet secretaries who oversee the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service to sell between 0.5% and 0.75% of the land they oversee.

Many outdoors and environmental advocates have fiercely opposed the proposal, arguing it threatens public access to land.

“Selling off public lands is short-sighted, self-serving and irreversible,” reads a letter to senators signed by more than 100 organizations advocating against Lee’s proposal. “These lands belong to all Americans. Once they’re sold, they’re gone for good — fences go up, access disappears and they are lost to the public forever.”

The current version of the bill proposed in the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources directs cabinet secretaries to consult with governors, local governments and applicable tribal governments before selecting land to be sold, but it gives discretion to those secretaries to determine whether parcels of land meet criteria for housing suitability and infrastructure access.

The bill states that secretaries “shall give priority consideration to the disposal of tracts” that meet several requirements, “as determined by the secretary concerned.”

Lee said he is “working on changes” to the proposal that would limit eligible land to Forest Service land “within 2 miles of a population center” and Bureau of Land Management Land within 5 miles, and appeared to suggest an updated version could also limit that land be sold for development of single-family homes — “not high density housing of any kind.”

It remains unclear whether the proposal would significantly impact housing supply in the fastest-growing areas along the Wasatch Front.

There are a few parcels of eligible lands adjacent to developments in Utah County, though most are in canyons or remote parts of the state, according to a map of eligible land compiled by the Wilderness Society.

A recent report from Headwaters Economics estimates that only 2.4 million acres of federal lands are near towns with housing needs, but nearly 60% of those acres face high wildfire risk — “leaving only about 1 million acres realistically available for safe development,” according to the report, which estimates that fewer than 50,000 housing units are feasible on federal land in Utah.

The Beehive State was short more than 37,000 units, according to an October 2024 report to lawmakers, and will need more than 150,000 new units by 2030 — 134,000 of which are needed along the Wasatch Front and in Washington County.

Lee correctly pointed out in a post from his official account on X that his proposal doesn’t allow for the sale of national parks, monuments and other federally protected land, but added that the bill “identifies unused, garden-variety federal parcels for potential disposal — nothing more.”

The post was tagged with Community Note — X’s feature through which users “collaboratively add context to potentially misleadings posts” — noting that “no parcels are explicitly identified in the bill.”

“It delegates enormous discretion to governors and local governments to decide what counts as ‘suitable,’ and that discretion is not limited to obviously ‘unused, garden-variety’ parcels,” the note states.

Critics of the proposal have asked Lee for more specifics about which parcels of lands could be up for sale. Lee slammed the Wilderness Society’s map of eligible lands as “flat out misleading” in his interview with Beck, but a person close to the group said it felt the need to produce the map due to what it believes is a lack of transparency around the proposed sales.

Benji Backer, author of “The Conservative Environmentalist,” shared Lee’s post, asking the senator to “provide us a map of the land you’re trying to sell.”

“It’s pretty simple,” he added. “If you’re selling 3 million acres of OUR land, we deserve to know what’s being sold.”

Lee has continued to defend the proposal as something that would give “countless families a shot at the American dream,” and told Beck he is optimistic that his provisions will get through the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“We’ve also got to make it possible for people to continue to live the American dream and the way to happiness is not more government ownership,” he said. “The way to happiness is to allow the American people a fighting chance in the race of life and the ability to raise their families. On no planet is it unreasonable to say we’re going to take a fraction of a percent of federal land that’s not protected and make it potentially eligible for consideration for where people could live.”