Here’s The 120 Million Acres Of Public Land Republicans Want To Sell

“There are 120 million acres on the chopping block.” Former BLM Director / current The Wilderness Society President Tracy Stone-Manning dropped that bombshell to me just a few minutes ago during our Substack Live interview. While Senate Republicans are mandating the sale of somewhere between 2.02 and 3.3 million acres of Forest Service and BLM land as part of their budget reconciliation package for FY2026, Stone-Manning explains that the bill’s text actually creates the potential for ongoing sales like that every year, until it’s all gone.

“The bill mandates disposal…of BLM and National Forest lands in 11 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming),” explains The Wilderness Society, which analyzed the bill’s provisions for proximity to population centers and carve outs for still-protected Wilderness areas and acreage already under lease, to figure out just how much land the legislation could potentially impact.

You can view The Wilderness Society’s map at this link.

TWS’s tabulation of acreage opened up for sale by the Senate’s budget package.

Notably absent from this list is any acreage in Montana. Recognizing that he’s vulnerable in the 2026 mid-terms, it seems as if Steve Daines (R-Montana), negotiated with Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chair Mike Lee (R-Utah) to exempt this state from impacts.

“Public land sell-off is a sell-out, right?,” Stone-Manning, a fellow Montanan says. “It doesn’t matter where it is.” She goes on to explain that public lands are owned by and accessible to all Americans, regardless of where they’re from or currently live.

Since public lands provide a reservoir for clean air, clean water, and abundant biodiversity on which the entire country relies, as well as the places where we recreate outdoors, it’s the total breadth of our public lands system that matters to every person in America, not just the slices of it near where we live.

And that’s a problem, because, as Stone-Manning cautions, the Senate reconciliation package language creates both precedent and permission for selling the acreage identified here. All future budget bills would have to do is keep the sell-off rolling, something it will be much easier for lawmakers to vote to approve, especially if revenue from those sales is already figured into future tabulations around the federal deficit.

Separately, E&E News reports that may already be the case. Math in this current budget relies on sell-offs of public land generating between $5 and 10 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years.

What all that means is, should this measure pass into law as part of budget legislation, it could predicate the cessation of ongoing annual land sales on passing additional measures like increases to income tax to offset the revenue those sales will be generating.

Should this pass, it could be virtually impossible to stop the sale of the lands identified here. Lands that total 120 million acres.

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