You’ve Inherited Millions of Acres. Republicans Are Stealing It From You.

This land may not be your land for much longer

Here’s some great news: If you are a U.S. citizen, you are part-owner of a vast 640 million-acre estate. That’s right! You own seashores in North Carolina, mountains in Wyoming, forests in Idaho, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, rivers in Georgia, Glacier National Park in Montana, and thousands of other tracts across our nation. Congratulations! As part of this singular national inheritance, you’ve been entrusted to collectively own and manage our “public land” for generations.

That trust has been warranted. Our public land is proof that we can do the hard work of governing ourselves, which is really the essence of our democratic experiment. It’s not easy, but over time, the U.S. has established management agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. We’ve also enacted laws like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act to address the diverse needs of the more than 300 million citizens who own these places, including hikers, ranchers, fishermen, miners, bird watchers, and hunters.

No royalty, wealth, or status is required to access rivers or hiking trails in the United States; our public land is accessible to all. These rare and treasured cultural leveling devices don’t require a gold card and don’t discriminate.

Now that you understand your incredible inheritance, it's time to sound the alarm. Right now, Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration are attempting to sell millions of acres of our land and gut the management agencies and laws we have built to maintain it. Democrats are unified in their vehement opposition, while Republicans made repeated attempts to cram the sale into the Senate budget bill. When widespread public outcry led to the last-minute removal, Senator Mike Lee issued a statement indicating that he intends to work with Trump on a future effort to sell public land.

This GOP-led effort is not new. Republicans have been signaling their intent for years by doing things like placing anti-public land planks in their state and national party platforms and attacking agency staffing at every opportunity. Actions like those have weakened our public lands, but the situation became much more serious earlier this year, not long after Trump’s second inauguration.

First, Trump issued a series of executive orders meant to weaken laws we have in place to guard against irresponsible exploitation on our lands. These aggressive rollbacks pose a direct threat to iconic landscapes across our nation. This map from The Wilderness Society illustrates the breadth of the threat to our public places just from those executive orders:

Map: The Wilderness Society. Source: DOI, NPS, BLM, USFS

On March 17, at the behest of the President, billionaire and newly minted Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made things even worse when he announced that the administration intended to sell hundreds of thousands of acres of our land under the guise of solving the housing crisis. Democrats aren’t buying it, believing instead that the entire effort is a ploy to sell the land to billionaires and campaign donors. In a recent hearing, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto highlighted the holes in the GOP housing argument, explaining that the land in question is “in the middle of the desert. There’s no infrastructure. I don’t know any builder who is going to build housing in the middle of the desert, it makes no sense.”

A few weeks after Burgum’s announcement, Senator Mike Lee, who said that he “worked closely” with Senator Steve Daines, inserted language into the Senate version of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that mandated the sale of up to 3.3 million acres and authorized the sale of close to 259 million additional acres from New Mexico to Northern Alaska. Those moves, which jeopardized 40 percent of our shared estate, sent shockwaves through the public land advocacy community that had been warning of such an attack for years.

The Wilderness Society compiled a map of the lands that were endangered under Trump’s budget bill until the removal of the federal land sale provision over the weekend, and which still gives an idea of the administration’s future goals. If you live in or have visited the West, chances are some place you love is on it:

The Trump administration has also declared that it would rescind a nearly 25-year-old bedrock conservation policy called “The Roadless Rule,” which protects more than 58 million acres of national forests. These include some of the world's last remaining pristine salmon-producing ecosystems, located in Southeast Alaska. They also withdrew from the cooperative Columbia River salmon recovery agreement, an agreement crafted after years of careful negotiation with state and tribal governments.

The administration also provides handouts for the largest extractive corporations by insisting that the budget bill include quarterly lease sales in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Alaska. It also dramatically expands coal mining and mandates oil and gas lease sales in “any state where there is land available for oil and gas leasing under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920,” including on sensitive sites adjacent to national parks and monuments. They followed these demands with language that allows the same large extractive corporations to pay for an expedited permitting process, which would be immune from review by our legislative bodies, judges, or courts.

This all adds up to stark reality: Republicans are waging an all-out war on our public land inheritance. They are attacking from almost every direction and with a variety of weapons. They are targeting entire ecosystems and small recreational tracts. Where they cannot sell, they weaken and defund. One way or another, they seem determined to wrestle this uniquely American inheritance from us all, and nothing could be more unpatriotic than that.

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Ryan Busse is an author, conservationist, environmental advocate, former firearms executive, and co-founder of Public Land Warriors.