Jordan Schreiber is worried about your favorite trail. The Jackson Hole native spends most of her time in Washington D.C. as the director of government relations for the Wilderness Society.
The environmental advocacy group recently created a map of federal public land up for grabs if a proposed amendment is added to the federal budget and passed. Federal lawmakers are considering selling off up to 3 million acres of public land in 11 western states, including Wyoming, within the next five years.
“Folks should be concerned if there are parcels in their backyard where they go mountain biking or hunting because they’re vulnerable,” Schreiber said.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee introduced the measure on June 11.
The bill states that prioritized land would be near existing infrastructure and other development and “suitable for residential housing.”
This comes as lawmakers grapple with budget reconciliation in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” The measure mandates review of nearly all U.S. Forest Service land and Bureau of Land Management lands, 250 million acres by some estimations, for their ability to support housing.
In Wyoming, that means 15 million acres including the Bridger-Teton National Forest and a spattering of BLM lands in Teton County. Grand Teton National Park and the National Elk Refuge are excluded. On the Idaho side of Teton Pass, the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and a larger swath of BLM lands are also being reviewed.
“So that parcel of forest service land where you go for your afternoon run could very easily, within six months, be bought up and fenced off,” Schreiber said.
The amendment would require a fraction of reviewed land to be sold, between about 2 million and 3 million acres of land between both the BLM and USFS in the next five years. That’s four times the size of Rhode Island.
Specific parcels are still in question. The quota will likely be made up of a hodgepodge of land from several states, she said.
“There’s a world in which all three million acres are in Wyoming, and there’s a word in which zero acres are Wyoming,” Schreiber said, “It’s just a matter of where these parcels get nominated.”
A state can nominate as many parcels as it wants while individual entities can nominate two for consideration to the Secretary of the Interior and Agriculture, who manages the BLM and USFS. State and local governments would be given the first opportunity to buy nominated parcels before “any interested party.”
What the bill leaves out, Schreiber said, is guardrails to ensure housing is built and affordable.
“It’s technically for housing, but nowhere in the bill does it say it’s for affordable housing,” Schreiber said, “plus the land has to be sold at fair market value, which is not conducive to affordable housing.”
The only people that will be able to afford these parcels, Schreiber said, would be “tech billionaires and developers.”
As recently as the last legislative session, Wyoming state lawmakers have shown interest in transferring federal lands to the state.
The bill amendment also includes provisions for more oil drilling and mining leases. Schreiber questions the conservative narrative that land sales will ease the national deficit and the housing crisis.
“It is probably the worst bill in history for the environment. But so much of that is reversible,” Schreiber said, “Once you sell off public lands, they’re just gone.”
The bill notably excludes Montana from the 11 Western states. The state’s Republican congressional delegation led by former Secretary of the Interior and current U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican, is opposed to a federal public land sale.
“It is very obvious that Lee was trying to buy off the Montana delegation by excluding the state of Montana,” Schreiber said.
Wyoming’s U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman is not opposed to the bill amendment and has told other news outlets she believes the map displays an overcount of land for sale.
Schreiber still has hope the bill won’t succeed because of broad support for public land throughout the West and a groundswell of opposition to its sale in the past week as the map has spread online through hunter and recreationist circles.
Schreiber says a vote could happen on the budget bill as soon as this month, but it will likely be later.
