America’s public lands are a unique and popular political creation, but Republicans have launched their biggest attack on them since President Ronald Reagan gave legitimacy to the Sagebrush Rebellion by appointing James Watt Secretary of the Interior in 1981.
Earlier this year Congressional Republicans passed nonbinding budget resolutions in the U.S. Senate and House that suggested privatizing public lands by giving them to the states. And Republican legislatures in several Western states have passed measures promoting the distribution of federal lands to the states. This new assault is being supported by the American Lands Council, with support from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative think tank supported by the Koch brothers.
Smokey Bear Was Wrong
The growing frequency of catastrophic wildfires on Western public lands is the cornerstone of Republican claims that the states would be better environmental stewards. This isn’t a fair criticism of federal land management, however, because American forestry suffered from bad science until relatively recently. Ecologists now understand that many ecosystems are fire-adapted, and depend upon periodic low-intensity wildfires to maintain their health. Moreover, ongoing climate change is making the West steadily drier and hotter.
But for many years land managers used Smokey Bear to promote the idea that all forest fires were bad. The resultant suppression of natural fire regimes is the primary reason that many forests on public lands are now unnaturally dense with brush and trees, making them more susceptible to catastrophic fires. Higher temperatures and lower humidities from climate change are also contributing to the situation.
The most prevalent commercial activity on Western public lands is cattle ranching. The supporters of the transfer of public lands to the states claim that states would be “superior” environmental stewards of public lands. But the Western states have very poor reputations when it comes to managing grazing on state lands. The Arizona State Land Department, for instance, manages approximately 9.2 million acres of State Trust lands and the vast majority of it is leased to ranchers for livestock grazing. The department does little to implement livestock management plans and the state’s grazing lands are widely considered to be in worse shape than local grazing allotments administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service. In fact, the department has such a bad reputation regarding livestock management that in the 1980s thousands of acres of environmentally sensitive state lands were traded to the BLM to try and protect them.
Some proposals call for privatizing public lands, selling them off instead of giving them to the states. They claim that economic production could be increased on them. But the reason so much land in is still owned by the federal government in the Western states is that nobody wanted it because it was too mountainous and/or dry.
The pattern of federal land ownership during the westward expansion from the original 13 colonies was set by the passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. After the claims of local Native American tribes were extinguished, the government surveyed the land and sold as much of it as they could, except for some parcels given to the states with the requirement that they be used to support local public schools. The Arizona State Land Department manages these lands in Arizona.
Special natural places on federal land began to be set aside when the Yellowstone Act of 1872 created Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 allowed federal land to be set aside to establish national forest reserves to preserve important watersheds by requiring controlled timber cutting. In 1905 the Forest Service was created to manage these lands, now called National Forests.
Those federal lands that weren’t set aside for the common good were still available to settlers. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave people the opportunity to obtain ownership of a parcel of federal land without having to buy it. All they had to do was live on the land and prove they had farmed it for five years. Despite these generous terms, only about 40 percent of the applicants succeeded in getting a land title because, by 1862, most of the unsettled lands were in the arid West and not suited for agriculture.
In 1946 the BLM was created to manage most of the land that hadn’t been set aside for protection and was still owned by the federal government. President Herbert Hoover had proposed to deed these lands to the Western states in 1932, but they declined his offer, complaining that it would cost too much to manage them.
Commodity Producers Oppose the Multiple Use Doctrine
Attempts to privatize the West’s public lands aren’t new. For example, a 1947 editorial titled the Great Land Grab criticizing the idea was published in the newsletter of an Arizona conservation group.
Today’s Republican assault against public lands is partly a reaction to the relatively recent successes that conservationists have had in getting long-standing environmental laws applied on most federal lands. They include the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, Endangered Species Act of 1973, National Forest Management Act of 1976, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976. These laws changed the management of public lands by making commodity production just another use, instead of the dominant use that it was for many years. They defined a new multiple use doctrine, wherein all activities shouldn’t be permitted on all public lands, and the objective of public lands management isn’t necessarily the maximization of commodity production – but to identify the appropriate mix of uses that are in the best interests of the general public. In other words, a fair and common sense strategy.
It’s taken many years of social activism and federal court cases filed by conservation groups to get things changed on the ground, and this struggle still continues in some localities. An example of the local political opposition these laws have faced is shown by the Clinton administration’s Rangeland Reform ’94 initiative to update public lands grazing regulations. The promulgation of these new rules took place many years after the laws they codified were passed by Congress.
Old school Westerners who were easily able to profit off public lands dislike the new ethical paradigm represented by the implementation of the multiple use doctrine. Ranchers holding federal grazing permits have been especially stubborn, as evidenced by the recent behavior of rancher Cliven Bundy in Nevada when the BLM attempted to enforce the law.
The Fossil Fuel Industry is Funding the Attack
This latest attack against public lands taps into rancher discontent, but the real impetus comes from deep-pocketed oil and natural gas producers. New hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies have created a boom in fossil fuel exploration and production and the industry doesn’t like the federal environmental regulations that apply to their operations on public lands. Earlier this year, for example, Congressional Republicans introduced the Federal Lands Freedom Act, which proposes to give the states the power “to control the development and production of all forms of energy on all available Federal land.” Fossil fuel producers obviously think it would be easier for them to deal with state regulators, and they’re probably right about that. For instance, the primary reason Arizona Republican legislators supported the creation of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) in 1986 was to allow the state to try and take over the enforcement of national environmental laws from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with the tacit understanding that state enforcement would be more lenient.
Public Lands Are a Treasure, Not a Burden
The argument that federal lands, as they are currently managed, are burden upon rural economies in the West needs to be closely examined. An often heard claim is that local governments with lots of public lands within their boundaries cannot collect sufficient tax revenue because federal lands are exempt from private property taxes. But in 1976 Congress also created the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program to provide payments to them to offset the lost tax revenue. Arizona, for example, received more than $30 million in PILT funds during the 2014 federal fiscal year.
And a fair assessment of the economic production from public lands must take into account everything they produce. According to a 2003 economic analysis report from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, fishing in Arizona generated an estimated $831.5 million on equipment and trip-related expenditures annually, while hunters accounted for an additional $126.5 million in retail sales, for a combined $958 million. The multiplier effect means this money had a $1.34 billion total economic impact, including $58 million in state tax revenue. The Outdoor Industry Association says that all forms of outdoor recreation in Arizona generate $10.6 billion in consumer spending annually. A very large portion of these activities occur on Arizona’s public lands.
Less tangible benefits from public lands must also be considered. One of the original reasons for the creation of National Forests, for instance, was to help protect municipal watersheds. This continues to be important in the arid West where many cities, such as Phoenix, rely upon upstream reservoirs for their water supplies.
Public lands are also reservoirs of biodiversity. Public lands will become increasingly important for preserving biodiversity because scientists say we have entered the Anthropocene Epoch in Earth’s history, wherein humans are having an unprecedented impact upon the planet. Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels, along with demands put upon natural resources by the growing human population, are combining to damage and destroy entire ecosystems. The millions of acres of undeveloped public lands in the West are the best hope for many endangered plant and animal species.
The Bottom Line
The existing multiple use doctrine allows for mining, logging, grazing, and drilling activities to occur on federal lands – but only where they are appropriate and only when they comply with environmental laws. This wise philosophy is the real target of the proponents of turning public lands over to the states. They want to go back to the not-so-distant bad old days, when commodity production monopolized public lands. They don’t have the support of the general public, as shown by the defeat of Proposition 120 in Arizona in 2012. This measure was placed on the ballot by the Republican-led legislature and called for the state to unilaterally declare it’s control over its federal public lands. It was soundly defeated, with 67.7% of the voters rejecting it. Privatizing public lands is just more right-wing Republican kookery.
Updates
On April 11, 2019, the U.S. Senate confirmed Pres. Trump’s appointment of former fossil fuels lobbyist David Bernhardt, who doesn’t believe there should be public lands, to be the Secretary of the Interior.
On July 16, 2019, the Trump administration confirmed plans to relocate most of the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters staff from Washington, D.C., to the West by the end of 2020. The move was seen as a first step towards privatizing BLM lands, which are administered under the Department of the Interior.
On July 29, 2019, Interior Secretary Bernhardt appointed William Perry Pendley to be the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. Like Secretary Bernhardt, Pendley believes that public lands should be sold off.
In June 2025 U.S. Senate Republicans released the text for a megabill, H.R. 1, promoted by Pres. Donald Trump, which he dubbed the “One Beautiful Bill,” that included the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of public lands across the West. This land sales proposal, promoted by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was removed from the final bill due to intense, widespread political opposition. The sales proposal, of course, excluded all lands that were parts of public land grazing allotments.