Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee withdrew his controversial federal land sale provision from the “big beautiful” tax bill after public pressure from citizens and lawmakers, he said in a Saturday tweet.
“Because of the strict constraints of the budget reconciliation process, I was unable to secure clear, enforceable 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,” Lee wrote in the tweet.
“For that reason, I’ve made the decision to withdraw the federal land sales provision from the bill,” he wrote.
Lee’s proposed amendment would have instructed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Services (FS) to identify and sell between 0.5 and 0.75 percent of the public lands they hold exclusively for housing purposes.
The proposal had evoked rage in citizens of western states where the majority of lands are public.
It had also drawn public criticism from lawmakers in some of these states, including GOP Senators from Idaho and Montana.
Despite Lee’s proposal exempting Montana from the land sale provision, the state’s Republican Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy threatened to introduce their own amendment to strip the bill of Lee’s proposal.
The pair celebrated Lee’s withdrawal in a joint statement. (RELATED: Senate GOP Takes Sledgehammer To Biden’s Green Energy Subsidies)
“Public lands belong in public hands. Blocking the sale of public lands is a victory for our Montana way of life,” they wrote in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Lee, one of 51 GOP Senators to vote yes on advancing the tax bill to debate Saturday night, indicated he was not finished trying to fight for public land sale and would try to work with President Donald Trump on the issue in the future.
“I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land-land it is mismanaging and in many cases ruining for the next generation. Under Democratic presidents, massive swaths of the West are being locked away from the people who live there, with no meaningful recourse. That has real consequences for Utahns-from raising taxes for schools and funding local search-and-rescue operations, to being able to build homes and sustain rural communities,” he wrote in his statement.
“President Trump promised to put underutilized federal land to work for American families, and I look forward to helping him achieve that in a way that respects the legacy of our public lands and reflects the values of the people who use them most,” he wrote.
Roughly 40 percent of American land is publicly owned with 28 percent of it belonging to the federal government. The vast majority of that public land is concentrated in the continental U.S.’s 12 westernmost states.
