The One Big Beautiful Bill ran headlong into our love for Big, Beautiful America, and once again a bipartisan movement is telling the politicians, “Hands off our public lands!”
We can hope they’ll listen this time, but if you’ve committed yourself to holding your breath until they do, make sure you’re surrounded by plenty of pillows to break your fall when you pass out.
What are we talking about here? The legislation central to President Donald Trump’s agenda is the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It’s a budget reconciliation bill (meaning it can pass the Senate with a simple majority) that would extend tax cuts passed in 2017, increase defense spending, reduce funding for SNAP payments (food stamps) and Medicaid, and reduce clean-energy tax credits approved during the Biden administration.
What does that have to do with public lands? Tax cuts are expensive. The bill is projected to increase the federal deficit by trillions. Ostensibly to reduce this deficit increase, though more probably because it supports his anti-public lands agenda, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, inserted an amendment that calls on the government to sell 2 to 3 million acres of federal land, primarily Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management properties.
In addition to the deficit-reducing notion, Lee also suggests the federal lands could be sold to promote more housing, more “affordable” housing.
Come on now, pick yourself up off the floor and stop laughing hysterically at the senator’s vision of selling remote parcels to build cheap homes and solve America’s housing crisis. You’re gonna hurt his fee fees.
Lee is a worthy pantomime villain for this One Big Beautiful failure of an idea. On June 14, 2025, when a crazed gunman shot and killed a Minnesota state senator and her husband, and wounded another legislator and his wife, Lee thought it appropriate to mock the governor of Minnesota on social media, implying he was somehow responsible for the shootings.
Here’s another “Lee’s a jerk” anecdote. During the 2023 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden criticized Republicans for planning to gut Social Security. Lee reacted with the sort of exaggerated, feigned outrage you’d expect from some dude on a reality show pretending he’s not the father of the child his girlfriend has been raising without his support, until the DNA evidence proves otherwise.
Then, a video emerged of Lee telling a group of donors: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.”
You can criticize Biden for projecting the will of a few on the entire GOP caucus, and you may even think Social Security needs cutting. What you can’t do, however, is condone Lee’s performative display for the cameras at the State of the Union — a display so inauthentic it would have got him thrown out of any self-respecting community theater workshop — when he was saying the exact opposite behind closed doors to donors.
The dude’s a creep, even by Washington politico standards.
Fortunately, opposition is growing. The land-sale provision wasn’t even included in the House version of the bill because Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., was a “hard no” on the idea, according to www.thehill.com. With Montana’s senators also opposed, the state was left out of Lee’s amendment.
The Idaho Statesman is now reporting both Gem State senators also oppose the amendment, and a grassroots movement of hunters and anglers is raising effective, bipartisan opposition.
Further dooming Lee’s plan — as of Tuesday, June 24, 2025, the Senate parliamentarian had struck his amendment from the reconciliation bill.
I’d be shocked if Lee’s scheme survives.
If a Republican from Utah can unite Republican delegations from Montana and Idaho in opposition to his amendment, that Republican has clearly strayed well outside the mainstream of his party.
That’s good news for Public Landowners.