New Republican Demand: Sell 3.3Million Acres Of Public Land In 12 States

It's Time To Get Real About What Must Be Done To Stop It

Late Wednesday afternoon, in a stunning move, Senate Republicans announced their intent to demand the sale of 3.3 million acres of your public land. The outcry of opposition from Americans not named Exxon, Koch, Conoco, Burgum, or Trump has been quick and severe. Senator Martin Heinrich, D - NM, summed up the angry shock of Americans with his official response: “Republicans have finally said the quiet part out loud: They want to put millions of acres of our public lands up in a fire sale…If Senate Republicans succeed, we all lose.”¹ Outdoor Life’s Andrew McKean posted his article on the betrayal with this additional note: “New And Astonishing Public-Land Sale Acreages from Senate Republicans.”² Former Montana Bureau of Land Management director Mike Penfold made the stakes clear: “These guys who want to take this public land away from us, take that heritage away from us, know that the rich people in this country are the ones who would benefit from it.”³

Social Media Post from Outdoor Life’s Andrew McKean

As all of this was unfolding, Vice President JD Vance was being shepherded around the Matador Ranch near Dillon, Montana. At more than 390,00 acres, it’s one of the largest ranches in the country and is owned by Faux News founder Rupert Murdoch. That ranch contains, and is surrounded by, beautiful and valuable public land that Murdoch would no doubt love to purchase for himself. And like any shrewd businessman, Murdoch knows where the pressure points are and is doing his part to get at them. There are very few people in the world who have done more than Murdoch to aid in the elections of the Republicans, who are now making the push to sell our public land.

New Story About Vance’s Visit to Succession Set

For those who have closely followed the public lands issue, the GOP announcement yesterday is only surprising in its brazen honesty. This is the culmination of a decade-long, well-funded backroom Republican effort that has placed anti-public lands planks in the official Republican party platforms in 11 states. This most recent overt push is led by Utah Senator Mike Lee, a longtime advocate of selling our land who, together with the Trump administration, concocted the laughable excuse of alleviating the “affordable housing crisis” as a justification for this massive effort to sell vast tracts of land to developers and energy companies.

The lunacy of the effort clearly aimed at selling our remote land to Billionaire donors under the guise of housing was brought into full releif yesterday in a Senate hearing when Democratic Senator Catherine Cortex Masto grilled Trump administraiton officials about the ruse; “I don’t know any builder who is going to build housing in the middle of the desert, it makes no sense,”⁴

The leading enthusiastic administration cheerleader and the man Cortez Masto was questioning is Billionaire Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, who owns an estate in Montana’s Yellowstone Club (YC), an exclusive development containing some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

Maybe the Nevada Senator should have cut Burgum some slack because, given his own personal traumatic housing experience, it’s understandable why the Secretary would be so stressed by the lack of affordability in Western states and so eager to sell public lands to correct it. I mean, c’mon, poor Mr Burgum is confronted with the problem right out his front door at the YC, where “Residential options range from custom-designed single-family residences and carefully harvested timber wood chalets to enormous ranches set on 160 acres of land.” For the budget-minded, empty lots start at about $2 million or “furnished and unfurnished condos and townhouses with one to eight bedrooms. The smallest condos cost approximately $3 million, while single-family homes start at $5 million, and there is also an initial fee of $400,000, in addition to $40,000 a year for dues.”⁵

Burgum struggles to contain giddy laughter at the prospect of selling public lands

There are other equally offensive Montana connections to this disastrous Republican plan. Newly minted senator Tim Sheehy (the Personal pick of Steve Daines and the guy who weirdly asked about pushups in the SecDef confirmation hearing) is on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), which is an organization with very deep roots in the movement to sell our land. Sheehy’s leadership of PERC was a hot-button issue in the campaign. He even photoshopped the PERC logo off his clothing in campaign ads to deceive voters about his true intent.⁶

This sort of Republican deception is understandable given that the founder and former director of PERC authored an extensive 25-page plan entitled “How and Why to Privatize Public Lands,” and the organization has been an ardent opponent of Montana’s treasured best-in-nation stream access laws.⁷ Sadly, the deception worked. Sheehy won that election and defeated Jon Tester, a friend and true Public Land Champion with a record to prove it.

This brings me to the inevitable “what to do about it?” section. Look, there are good organizations that care about public lands. I belong to and support many. Those are organizations that do good things, but when it comes to impacting policy, they are primarily built for a more polite, simpler time when policy was nudged back and forth a few inches over drinks in DC bars.

For most policies, those days are gone. Among the many terrible impacts of Trumpism is that it has stripped the nuance and politeness from our debates. The resulting all-or-nothingness has been fully adopted by the party he now controls. No more worrying about paint colors or curtain fabric in our structures. Trump and his party have stripped that house down to the studs. The remaining core of the building is clear. Massive extractive and development corporations that are driving the Republican party to sell your public lands, see it for what it is. They know that 99.9% of policy is decided on a Tuesday in November. They know what too many people do not; either you care enough to win that day, or you read substack updates like this about an entire party executing on its relentless push to do things like sell your public lands.

The Real Forces Behind It All

“What about national political organizations?” you might ask. Let’s be honest, there is a “stuck in the past” problem there, too. The Democratic party thinks it can hover around and watch, swoop into a few races just before the election, spend a bunch of money on phony ads, and make everything alright. Well, I think that’s a dangerous combination of naiveté and insanity; precisely the kind of thinking that got Tester beat. That may be how elections used to work. But in this new world, we have to engage in long-term cultural knife fights that influence perceptions and voting.

So instead of telling you what to do, I’m going to tell you what I am doing. I started Public Land Warriors with my friend Brandon Hall to address these realities. We do two things: Raise money and use it to advertise in key districts on hard-hitting public land messages. We are doing it because we care about public lands, not cocktail parties, hiring a big staff, or making money. We decided to meet the moment, so we, too, have stripped the essence of our effort down to the studs.

Since our recent launch, many of you have become supporters. Thank you. Within the next few days, and after only a couple of weeks of raising money, we will deploy our first ads. Your money is going directly to this effort, and we will not stop or be distracted. We will not pull punches or ignore the reality of our new political world. If you want to see what we are all about, I invite you to visit Public Land Warriors.

PLW Website Homepage

1. https://www.energy.senate.gov/2025/6/heinrich-statement-on-senate-republicans-plan-to-sell-off-public-lands-and-raise-energy-costs

2. https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/senate-proposes-selling-public-land/

3. https://www.ktvq.com/news/montana-news/public-lands-emerge-as-flashpoint-for-montana-u-s-senators-in-big-beautiful-bill-debate

4. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/politics/cortez-masto-grills-burgum-on-public-land-sales-proposal-for-senates-funding-bill/

5. https://www.estate-living.co.za/estates/yellowstone-club-amidst-the-rocky-mountain/

6. https://www.yahoo.com/news/sure-looks-gop-senate-hopeful-212341928.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFczRXoaYubsXenJXkYhVrck4vHHvji00wrX25z4e9U48xqXrirFbUpDRUqSQhluQWxJQj8eto4zCnvwIjdkpT-GK2mLtMoX8Xv1BcVqPyVaR9i9JkuXIt9u5rZ9OuJ6rqfsdJNYtPWP7zFGBdN4hg7j9Mt2PlF9yWbZ1OV-QCFl

7. https://www.perc.org/wp-content/uploads/old/pa1.pdf