Water and a plan to sell off public land
A new plan would make 250+ million acres of public land eligible for sale.
Last week, lawmakers introduced a new proposal to sell off roughly 3 million acres of public land in the Western U.S. as part of President Trump’s omnibus spending and tax bill, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
According to the Wilderness Society, more than 250 million acres of land managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management could be up for grabs under a leaked June 14 version of the proposal. Though the plan focuses on land, its effects on water could be profound.
«Here’s an interactive version of the map»
The eligible land excludes national parks and a few other protected areas, but it leaves open massive amounts of acreage in each Western state. These eligible areas include land with wilderness characteristics, grazing lands, wildlife corridors for threatened and endangered species, recreation areas and popular camping sites. Its also land that buffers the headwaters of some of our most important rivers in the West.
The U.S. Forest Service has a complex history, but much of the land it is responsible for (shown in green above) protects the source of clean drinking water for millions of people. Protecting this land from the impacts of private development was a reason for creating forests in the first place — and federal laws have long recognized this.
The Organic Administration Act (1897) states "no national forest shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States…"
A utilitarian vision of conservation, to be sure, but one that recognized the value in setting land aside in public ownership to benefit watershed protection.
Today, access to forest lands have benefited communities in other ways, providing places to camp, hike, raft and hunt; In the West, outdoor recreation is an important and growing industry, making up a noticeable share state GDP. Being able to recreate on public land is tied to access and public ownership.
This is not only true on Forest Service land, but it’s is also the case for some of the Bureau of Land Management parcels (roughly 164 million acres) that would be eligible for sale. The bureau is responsible for managing huge swaths of land, on which it permits use by industry (solar, oil and gas, geothermal, grazing, mining, recreation). The agency also oversees land for conservation and to protect critical wildlife habitat.
In Nevada, the agency oversees 67% of all land. In Utah, it’s closer to 42%. In Oregon, it’s about 25%. Accordingly, roughly 30 million acres of Nevada could be eligible for sale under this new proposal, the analysis from the Wilderness Society shows. That’s almost half of the state (~70 million acres), and there are major water implications here too.
Across the West, there has been a growing chorus to open up federal land for housing, but the opportunities to build housing are somewhat limited by acreage.
From a recent High Country News piece:
A recent analysis by Headwaters Economics found that public land transfers offer little promise as a housing solution.
“Our findings show that opportunities are limited to a few states, and are complicated by wildfire and drought risks, as well as other development challenges,” the researchers wrote. They found that less than 2% of Forest Service and Department of Interior land is close enough to population centers to make sense for housing development.
The only viable chunks of Forest Service land — defined as 5,000 acres or more — near towns are in Arizona, Utah and Oregon. Department of Interior parcels that could work for housing development are primarily in Nevada, Arizona, California, New Mexico and Utah, according to the analysis. Economists also found that more than half of federal lands within a quarter-mile of towns needing more housing and a population of at least 100 people had high wildfire risk.
Note “drought risk.”
Given its considerable reach and sometimes contradictory mission — permitting land for development while protecting it for conservation — the bureau can be an imperfect entity, frustrating many different people for many different reasons. But already has a process for selling land, focusing land sales and exchanges to meet community needs. Congress sometimes has stepped in with targeted land bills to speed things up.
Yet in most cases, policymakers aim to identify parcels eligible for sale through local planning that considers context, geography, community goals, and available resources. This kind of work is much more boring and less captivating to the public than a fire-sale of federal land. But it matters, in part, because of how scarce water is.
In the arid West, especially in particularly arid states like Nevada and Utah, water is a constraining factor, especially when new development is placed outside the context of existing planning for water use in an increasingly dry and uncertain present.
The map above (Bureau of Land Management land is shaded orange) shows eligible land available in places where water is simply scarce, and likely accounted for.
It raises the question of who would want to buy such land? And that question should be considered in the context of a West that has made — and continues to make — a tradition of land and water speculation. If history is any guide, once land is privatized and acquired, the race will be on to get water to land, and the pressure will be placed on politicians to go along, even if it means using more water than is sustainable.
More reading on the public land proposal:
The land Mike Lee proposes selling across the West (Salt Lake Tribune)
“Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good” (KJZZ)
Senate Republicans want to sell 3 million acres of land (High Country News)
There’s a new plan to sell off public lands. (Outside Magazine)
Colorado River watch:
The Trump administration announced its intent to nominate a former Arizona water official to serve as the leader of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. It comes at a critical time for the Colorado River. State representatives are working to negotiate operating rules for the river’s main reservoirs, which are managed by the bureau.
President Donald Trump has tapped longtime water manager Ted Cooke to be the next commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The nomination, submitted Monday to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, attempts to fill a pivotal role at the top federal agency for Western rivers, reservoirs and dams.
If confirmed, Cooke will become the main federal official overseeing Colorado River matters. His nomination comes at a tense time for the river. The seven states that use its water appear deadlocked in closed-door negotiations about sharing the shrinking water supply in the future.
Cooke will likely try to push those state negotiators toward agreement about who should feel the pain of water cutbacks and when. If they can’t reach a deal ahead of a 2026 deadline, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself.
“We have an opportunity to redefine what our relationship to the river is.”
The New York Times ran an excellent piece earlier this week that features a group of Indigenous kayakers, 13 to 20-year-olds, who are descending the full length of the Klamath River following the removal of four dams over the past year.
Last Tuesday, some of those teens, preparing for the expedition and practicing their skills, paddled through a section that had been the floor of Copco Lake for more than a century. They could see the fading shoreline of the old lake, as the river found its old course.
Water has memory, tribal elders say.
On riffling current, the paddlers passed houses that had stood lakeside for decades, now sitting far from the river’s edge, their old docks leading nowhere. They passed a graveyard of bald trees, still standing, that had been submerged for years. A boat anchor hung, tangled, on one of the naked gray limbs.
Entering Kikacéki Canyon, they passed the site of Copco 1. Almost all signs of the massive structure have been removed. This year’s river runners might not realize it had been there just last summer.
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I wrote about effects of this bill on our water, but I hadn't considered the land transfer aspect. My take was "A close reading of the bill reveals a significant policy pivot for the water sector, creating clear "winners" and "losers" by funding massive traditional infrastructure projects while simultaneously slashing support for the green, climate-focused, and data-centric programs that have gained prominence in recent years."
To me the loss of data will be especially bad, as it will allow masking of the effects of this and other legislation. However correlating federal land sale to water was a good insight. Nice article!
https://title22.substack.com/p/the-big-beautiful-bill