A New Vision for Public Lands

Policy debates around public lands point to larger unresolved questions about the nature and function of the public trust. What should we do with this national resource at a moment of major transition?

Solar panels outside the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument in California (David McNew/Getty Images)

Americans learn about public lands in history class, but if you live east of the Mississippi, you probably haven’t thought about them much since. You might know about the Homestead Act, which encouraged westward expansion by allowing settlers to make claims on land and take ownership after five years of residence. You could possibly recall the Taylor Grazing Act or the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, which together changed the government’s approach from disposal and privatization to holding and management. But unless you’ve recently gone on a Western road trip, you’re unlikely to have noticed that the federal government still owns more than a quarter of the land in this country and that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the nation’s largest landlord, managing 10 percent of the land in the United States. You likely don’t know that drilling on public lands is responsible for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions.

Yet public lands have been all over the news lately. At the 2024 vice presidential debate, J.D. Vance said, “We have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. . . . They could be places where we build a lot of housing.” This probably seemed like an esoteric digression to most viewers, but it was a dog whistle to Utah conservatives, such as Republican Senator Mike Lee, who have been trying for half a century to eliminate public lands through privatization and development. This agenda was included in an early version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would have opened up 250 million acres of public land for sale, with 2 to 3 million to be sold within five years. That provision was removed after bipartisan opposition, though the final version does expand timber sales and oil and gas leasing. Trump has also streamlined approvals, rolled back environmental protections, and defunded national monuments—all to