GOP Sen. Mike Lee Forced To Revise Plan To Sell Public Lands After Major Backlash

Sen. Mike Lee announced intentions to rework his plan mandating the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of public land in the American West after bipartisan backlash and an unfavorable ruling by the Senate’s rules referee.

“I’m doing everything I can to support President Trump and move this forward,” the Utah Republican wrote Monday in a post online. “Stay tuned. We’re just getting started.”

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised late Monday that Lee’s plan to allow the sale of millions of acres of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, which was included in the GOP’s massive tax-and-spending package, violated the chamber’s rules governing the budget reconciliation process that allows a majority to pass budget bills by side-stepping the filibuster.

Earlier this month, the Lee-led Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released the draft proposal as part of President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Lee argued the sale of public lands would increase affordable housing, emphasizing that it would exclude national parks, national monuments and designated wilderness areas.

But critics on the left and the right savaged Lee’s plan, contending that much of the federal land is uninhabitable, and would result in the loss of prized public spaces for Americans to enjoy and be replaced with vacation homes, ski villas and other luxury real estate.

Hunters and people in the fishing industry were particularly outraged by the proposal, urging Lee to drop it entirely.

A group of Western senators, including Montana’s Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, and Idaho’s Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, also opposed the plan.

“The way it’s written right now, it’s not going to pass,” Daines told reporters Monday.

Lee hasn’t released the details of his new draft, but he said Monday that it would not include sales of U.S. Forest Service land and would only include sales of public land “WITHIN 5 MILES of population centers.”

Democrats said they would continue to fight Lee’s plan and others Republicans are hoping to include in the $4 trillion bill, which would cut taxes mostly for the wealthy while cutting health care for vulnerable Americans on Medicaid.

“Democrats will not stand idly by while Republicans attempt to circumvent the rules of reconciliation in order to sell off public lands to fund tax breaks for billionaires,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said in a statement. “We will make sure the Byrd Rule is followed and review any changes Republicans attempt to make to the bill.”

Environmental groups, meanwhile, accused Lee of working to appease special interests.

“No one should believe his lies now, and any backroom deals to rewrite his legislation will still be a disaster for public lands,” Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement. “Sen. Lee doesn’t care about America’s real housing crisis, his legislation will still do nothing to solve it, and his bill will still be an unprecedented giveaway of public lands to special interests that is overwhelmingly unpopular with the American people.”