Sen. Mike Lee had ambitious plans to sell huge swaths of public lands, a long-sought goal for the Utah Republican. In the end, he walked away empty handed and alone.
The chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee made the public lands sales one of his signature issues in the struggle to pass what became the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But multiple snags proved to be insurmountable, either because of backlash from fellow Republicans or roadblocks from the Senate parliamentarian.
According to interviews with those involved in the fight, Lee badly miscalculated Republican support for the land sale proposal and failed to do the groundwork to get skeptics on board.
“There was virtually nobody else who supported it,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who said his office’s phone lines were ringing off the hook over the idea, despite North Carolina not being impacted.
“So I think over time it just tried to die an unceremonious death,” Tillis said. “[It was] even some of the most conservative members of our conference who were voicing the loudest opposition. … He’s not wrong about the concept, he was just not wise in the approach he used.”
The ferocious campaign against the land sales improbably united both conservationists and the MAGA right. They lambasted the plan as a “land grab.” Key House and Senate Republicans vowed to blow up the entire bill if the sales were included.
For his part, Lee said critics mischaracterized the plan, forcing him to pull the plug. In a recent interview, he declined to say whether he would renew his efforts in a future bill.
Lee similarly lost big on his regulation-busting effort, known as the “REINS Act.” The provision would have gutted federal regulations and dramatically expanded congressional veto power over agency rules, but also ran afoul of the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough.
In an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News, Lee said he was satisfied with the overall product, even minus two top priorities. His fingerprints were still all over the measure.
The bill, for instance, includes a sweeping new oil and gas leasing regime for both onshore and offshore and clawed back billions from the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.
“I had a lot of things in there that I liked, many of which came from me and and many of which also came from others,” he said. “There’s still a lot in there. Even though I wish we’d done more, we got a lot of good stuff in it,” he said.
On lands, however, Lee was on an island.
His last of several proposal would have sold up to 0.5 percent of Bureau of Land Management land across 11 Western states to build affordable housing, with exceptions for protected areas like national parks, monuments and refuges. Land offered would have needed to be within 5 miles of a population center.
Yet in short order, four Republican senators — Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy of Montana and Jim Risch and Mike Crapo of Idaho — publicly opposed the plan, though there were likely more who would have opposed the idea if it came to a vote.
Public lands are wildly popular in Montana, Idaho and many other states across the West, and tinkering with them comes with steep political peril.
Daines, who had initially tried lobbying Lee privately to scale back or nix his proposal, was organizing an amendment to strip the provision from the bill.
“We had the votes to strike it on the floor with an amendment, and at that point it got removed from the bill,” Daines said.
Others, however, attributed the failure of the public lands provision to poor planning or a lack of understanding of the Western constituency.
“We didn’t include enough of the right people earlier in the process,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a proponent of certain land sales.
‘Parade of horribles’ from ‘haters’
Lee blames the failure of his land sale provision on a coordinated campaign that took root on social media.
For weeks, hunting groups, outdoor recreation advocates and even prominent Republicans pummeled Lee’s proposal online and urged other senators to oppose it. Some alleged the bill would open up a fire sale of public lands to foreign nations and venture capital groups.
In Lee’s view, this online “parade of horribles” succeeded by alleging that such lands would be bought up by China or by investment management firms.
Those things were “never going to happen, but took on a life of their own,” Lee said. “They turned out to be very effective messages.”
To assuage those concerns, Lee said, he needed to add safeguards to the public lands provision that would have jeopardized its eligibility for passage by simple majority under the budget reconciliation process.
Senate rules dictate that everything within a reconciliation measure must be budgetary in nature. Any added language to bar land purchases by financial firms or foreign governments would have fallen outside that budgetary nexus, Lee said — which is why he ultimately opted to withdraw.
“That was a tough thing, and fairly unique to the combination of it being a reconciliation bill and the timing in which this massive online campaign was launched in order to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt on it,” he said.
Cramer agreed that the online campaign helped tank the land sales provision. “The influencers out there are pretty effective,” he said.
Yet he pushed back on the main idea that took root online, that any form of public land sales would destroy the American West and remove outdoor recreation opportunities for Americans.
“There are some haters who just think that the land should be returned to the era of Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark — who I have great affection for — and that’s that. And you can’t satisfy them. But I do think it was such a modest request, that it should not have been impossible to do,” Cramer said.
‘Biggest bullshit in the entire world’
The online push was broad and included some prominent Republicans. That included the likes of Chris LaCivita, President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign manager, alongside troves of hunting groups, including one that counts Donald Trump Jr. as a board member.
And one of the advocates involved in the lobbying push to kill the provision, who was granted anonymity to discuss behind-the-scenes developments, disagreed with Cramer and Lee’s blaming of social media pushback for the proposal’s failure.
“He wasn’t giving up because of the pushback, that is the biggest bullshit in the entire world,” the person said. “He only gave up because he knew he didn’t have a chance.”
The advocate also said Lee is scapegoating the online resistance for the proposal’s failure, when the senator’s real problem was his colleagues in the Senate.
“He’s just trying to find a scapegoat and blame somebody for the loss … there were a lot of neutrals, but there wasn’t a single senator that was like, ‘Yeah, I think this was a really good idea,’” the person said. “It’s not about BlackRock or China … he’s missing the complete point where people just don’t want this to happen.”
Though he has previously said he would try again on land sales at some point in the future, Lee seemed to hedge in a recent interview.
He said it is “too soon to speculate” on whether he would try to integrate land sales into another reconciliation bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said he’s hoping for additional reconciliation bills — one as earlier as this fall.
If Lee were to revive his land sales push, he could potentially see new support from other senators. Cramer speculated that a stand-alone measure to sell small portions of public lands in order to build housing could gain traction, and potentially even bipartisan interest.
When Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) and Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) pushed a land sales amendment in the House version of the GOP reconciliation bill, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) slammed them for not including bipartisan language to promote conservation. Other land sale plans have also included protections elsewhere.
“I think legislatively we can still do something similar,” Cramer said. “But include the right people early in the process.”
