Mike Lee's public plan sale plan looks like it's dead. For a while now, the Senator has been advocating for selling off millions of acres of public land in an attempt to help mitigate the federal budget deficit. He has been met with severe opposition, and now it seems like those opposing him have won.
Senator Mike Lee's Public Land Sale Plan Is Dead
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The federal budget is an issue. You know it, I know it, and the government knows it. However, people have varying opinions on how we should best solve this issue. Mike Lee's solution was to sell off millions of acres of public land. Outdoor Life shares that Lee's proposed plan "would have put more than a million acres of BLM land on the auction block." Additionally, they share that his proposal would have "created the largest disposal of public land since the Homestead Act."
In a statement released by Lee and his office, he accused the federal government of "owning far too much land." Additionally, he argued that they had been"mismanaging [the land] and in many cases ruining it for the next generation." However, many did not agree with Mike Lee's public land sale plan. Instead, Outdoor Life shares that "Tens of thousands of hunters, anglers, hikers, and public-land recreationists have pummeled the offices of their congressional delegations with increasingly strident demands to kill Lee's bill." Now, they have succeeded.
In that same statement, Lee wrote the following. "Because of the strict constraints of the budget reconciliation process, I was unable to secure clear, enforcable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families — not to China, not to BlackRock, and not to any foreign interests." It claims that it was because of that that he made the decision to "withdrawal the federal land sales provision from the bill."
