Under the proposed bill, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management would need to choose 0.5% to 0.75% of their land in 11 western states, including Utah, and list it for sale.
The Utah News Dispatch reports that’s roughly 2.2 million to 3.3 million acres.
“We're talking about isolated parcels that are difficult to manage or better suited for housing and infrastructure,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said in a video posted last week. “To our hunters, anglers and sportsmen, you will not lose access to the lands you love.”
Environmental groups are concerned about which federal lands can be included.
National parks, monuments and land with a “valid existing right” can’t be sold. That includes a mining claim or oil and gas lease. Until last weekend, it included grazing as well.
Nonprofit environmental group The Wilderness Society says, when Congress removed the grazing exemption, that doubled the amount of land eligible for sale. It went from 120 million acres to 258 million acres.
Click here for The Wilderness Society's map of land eligible for sale.
And in Utah specifically, the amount of sellable land spiked tenfold from 1.9 million acres to 18.7 million acres. That means hundreds of thousands of acres in Wasatch Back national forests used for grazing could now be eligible.
That includes land surrounding Mirror Lake Highway up to and past the Highline trailhead. The High Uintas Wilderness is not included.
Areas around Daniels Canyon and west of Strawberry Reservoir are eligible, and so are many parts of the Wasatch Mountains, including parts of ski resorts in Big and Little Cottonwood canyons.
Lee originally introduced the public land selloff provisions in the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee June 11. According to The Wilderness Society, it was amended June 14, expanding the eligible federal land.
The bill says the forest service and BLM should prioritize selling land near already developed areas and land suitable for residential development.
The Utah News Dispatch reports it’s one of 10 Senate bills in Republicans’ budget reconciliation package nicknamed the “big, beautiful bill.”
The bill passed the House of Representatives in May after Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy’s smaller-scale public lands sell-off provision was cut.
The House will need to vote on the “big, beautiful bill” again if the Senate passes it with any changes.
About 70% of Utah is federal land, including half of Summit County.
