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Poof, there goes some of your public lands? [1]
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Date: 2025-04-06
Just a short heads up on something I read this morning.
It’s fresh news and certainly unclear the extent to which they’re planning this, but our right wing extremist government may be making moves to try for a public lands grab.
This article I’m linking to and excerpting here indicates that the Senate voted down an amendment in the budget reconciliation process that would prevent the privatization of public lands. They use rationale like needing to close the budget gap and to provide more land at the edge of some Western cities experiencing a housing cost crisis, by providing adjacent National Forest lands (for example) as new areas to build housing.
While being fair minded might allow one to consider a very thorough and rational review of a small amount of such bordering lands to be converted for building housing in places experiencing shortages — which indeed is a real issue in some locations — only a fool would trust the maga government to lead the charge on this. My concern is that even if that’s all they did initially, it could certainly open the door for expanding such sales to larger swaths of land for other privatization and profit making purposes.
As for any other rationales, it’s not a stretch to think that they’d eventually see a two-fer here by selling off some of OUR PUBLIC’s land to contribute to the budget, to enable tax cuts for the wealthy more easily, and to allow their cronies to buy up some of the land and profit from it.
I’d like to hear what legal processes are applicable to such moves, as this is just the rejection of an amendment in the budget process so far. But it’s not a good sign as far as I can tell. It’s well known that the state of Utah wants to obtain control of a lot of the federal public lands there for their own purposes, which would likely involve resource exploitation and private ownership.
Here is a short excerpt from the article, and the article link. It does not seem to be putting anything into motion yet, but is a sign of where they want to go, it appears. Of course in some of the articles referenced/linked in this excerpt they say they would never promote wholesale pubic land sell-offs or the ruining of National Parks (but we know how much to trust what they say before they actually do it):
In a marathon voting session that stretched from Friday night into early Saturday morning, the GOP-led Senate voted to approve President Trump's latest budget framework but rejected an amendment aimed at preventing the privatization of public lands. The amendment was introduced by Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) in response to reports of Republicans' tentative plans to sell federal land in the Western United States in order to offset deficits incurred by Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. Some Republicans intend for the potentially privatized land to be used in order to address housing crises in gateway communities throughout the West, E&E News first reported, while others see the move simply as an opportunity to generate more revenue.
Story at:
www.sfgate.com/...
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/6/2314934/-Poof-there-goes-some-of-your-public-lands?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
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