On June 18, Utah Sen. Mike Lee introduced a proposal — part of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — that would have opened more than 8 million acres of public land in Utah to private buyers.
Ten days later, he withdrew the provision from the bill, as he couldn’t secure “safeguards” to ensure the land would be used for housing by American families.
Understanding the proposal
The proposed legislation included several popular Utah hiking trails, skiing areas and land surrounding, but not within, the state’s national parks.
John Ruple, a research professor at the University of Utah College of Law and a former senior counsel on the White House Council of Environmental Quality during the Biden administration, explained nuances to the legislation.
“Sen. Lee has tried to talk about it [the proposed legislation] in terms of addressing housing shortages and in terms of affordable housing, but there is nothing in the bill that limits any lands that are sold or requires them to be used for affordable housing,” he said.
Ruple explains that the language within Lee’s most recently revised proposal gives priority to housing and related infrastructure, which could include highways, airports, strip malls and other amenities that make the neighborhood more attractive to buyers.
“You could easily have a golf resort in the middle of the desert with the minimum house size of 7,000 feet on a 2-acre lot,” Ruple said. “Homes are going to sell for $3 or 4 million, so there’s a huge disconnect between the message he’s trying to convey and what the most language contains.”
Revisions
Additionally, the Senate parliamentarian, who oversees the application of session rules and proceedings, knocked down the proposal because it did not pass the Byrd rule.
“The Byrd rule says that you can only avoid the 60-vote requirement if that provision is budgetary in nature,” Ruple said. “Lee’s language was primarily policy in nature, and the budgetary pieces were kind of ancillary, as opposed to the main focus of the bill.”
In his social media post on X, Lee explained that public misinformation and “strict constraints of the budget reconciliation process” ultimately burdened the bill’s success.
Lee also revised the proposal to remove Forest Service land. The legislation will now only include Bureau of Land Management property within 5 miles of “population centers.”
Public reactions
Scott Braden, the executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, called the bill “deeply anti-conservation and anti-public lands.”
“[The bill] opens up vast tracts of wild public land across the West and Alaska to new oil and gas drilling,” Braden said. “[It] attempts to kill the American clean energy economy by gutting clean energy incentives for wind and solar power.”
Trisha Hedin, an administrator for Utah’s Grand County, told The Chronicle about her concerns about the bill.
“I am an avid outdoorswoman and have been my entire life,” Hedin said. “My quality of life revolves around my ability to be outdoors. I have a deep reverence for our public lands.”
She goes on to explain that the legislation is designed to benefit upper-class Utahns, not the working or middle class.
“Our citizens’ mental and physical health depend on public lands,” Hedin said. “We all utilized these lands to maintain our physical and mental well-being. A loss of these lands deprives our general citizenry of the components that make them whole and healthy.”
