If you're active at all on social media you have seen this controversy. Senator Mike Lee, usually a stalwart member of the right wing of the Republican Party, has a bill, which he wants to attach to the Big Beautiful Bill, which would allow sales of some Federal-owned lands under some circumstances.

This has generated massive backlash on MAGA social media, with not just random accounts (and possibly bots) but also reasonable people and influencers (such as Jonathan Keeperman of Passage Press) rising up in opposition to this bill.

If you've followed the DC policy conversation for a while this might seem surprising to you. After all, selling off Federal lands has long been a conservative priority. Especially out West, the Federal government owns larges swathes of land; almost 50%, which is a crazy number. One doesn't have to be a rabid libertarian to think that there's something wrong with that. In many of these states, Federal land ownership is a real and significant obstacle to building housing or really anything of value.

And some of the opposition has been self-defeating. Many people seem to be under the impression that Senator Lee wants to sell off Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon to drill for oil, which is obviously not true. (And every conservative proposal about selling Federal lands that we're aware of is careful about exempting national parks.) There was also a problem of communication. Senator Lee keeps saying he wants to make the land available for "affordable housing"; no doubt, he means more houses for more families; however, many in the MAGA world think (not entirely unreasonably, though inaccurately in this case) that "affordable housing" is code for "Section 8 housing blocks."

But there are also reality-based objections. Some of the MAGA influencers point out that there are no bars for foreigners or large companies to buy land, which in this era of BlackRock buying up rental housing and CCP-financed weird purchases of land near military bases, is a legitimate concern.

Let's get into the specifics of the bill.

First, the obvious stuff: Senator Lee's bill excludes all sorts of land that it is common sense to exclude. The bill explicitly excludes national parks, national monuments, and in short, any land with any kind of protected ecological or recreational status. There is also a provision stating any sale cannot violate any existing rights, which is important for entities that lease or use Federal land for grazing or mining or other commercial purposes, but also for some recreational uses. It's unclear what that means in practice: it could be interpreted to mean that lands with existing rights cannot be sold, or that in a sale the new owner must agree to preserve those rights. Still, it's an important safeguard.

What's more, the bill applies to 0.5 to 0.75% of the land. That's what we're talking about. Furthermore, it only applies to those states where the Federal government owns 40+% of the land (plus Washington). This includes the Senator's own state of Utah. As we've noted, in these states, large numbers of conservatives and just ordinary people who want to build housing or use land for some business purpose, have chafed under these constraints for a long time.

Finally, the bill sets out a process to sell the land. Firstly, states must nominate land that they want to sell, in accord with Senator Lee's federalist leanings. He defends the bill not just as selling Federal land, but as returning authority over that land to the states. Furthermore, the bill involves a consultation process involving every level of government.

But here's the provision that interested us the most: as part of the nomination process, the nominating entity must justify how the sale will serve "local housing needs." This is why Senator Lee keeps talking about this bill as a housing bill. More to the point, it seems to virtually guarantee that the land nominated will already be near existing cities or roads—hardly the same thing as BlackRock drilling for oil in pristine land.

It doesn't seem like this bill is some catastrophe.

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