What Is Conservative Principle on Federal Land Ownership?
The Trump administration proposed to sell some amount of undesignated federally owned land for housing development, and Senator Mike Lee — a Utah Republican — introduced legislation to enable that move. Then conservative objections forced Lee to reconsider:
“Hunter nation”: right-coded symbol against left-coded symbol, hunting vs. urbanization. Here are the thoughts of a Republican congressman and former Secretary of the Interior from Montana:
So conservative principle is that the federal government should own a lot of land, and manage it well, in good part to maintain right-coded outdoor culture: hunting, fishing, grazing. Turning public land into housing makes rural into urban, woods into condos. It makes more left-coded cultural space. MAGA loves federal power, goes the current argument:
However. The founding vision was of a federal government with limited authority, focusing on military and diplomatic affairs while managing only those domestic affairs that were plainly interstate matters. States were to manage internal affairs. The Property Clause of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate and “dispose of” federally acquired lands, and Congress mostly did that for a long time. The Northwest Ordinance, the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, the Dawes Act, and so on, created mechanisms for the distribution of federal land into private ownership.
Today, eighty percent of Nevada is federally owned land. It’s hard to reconcile that with the founding vision and the constitutional order it created. This isn’t a repudiation of the idea of “public land,” but it does lead to the conclusion that a great deal of federal land should have been at least transferred to state control at some point. But we arrive at 2025 to find conservative Republicans arguing that the federal ownership of public land must be sustained and protected — that a large-scale federal power is conservative and constitutionally sacrosanct.
You can find this argument all over social media: Federal land is our birthright, our heritage, our tradition, or Western way of life.
One of the arguments against federal sale is that the private acquisition of public land threatens to create functionally aristocratic land tenure, as with Larry Ellison’s ownership of 98% of Lanai, or Oprah Winfrey’s ownership of an enormous piece of Maui, or Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of a baronial estate on Kauaʻi. And land title lawfare is one of our oldest traditions, as with the evaporation of the New Hampshire grants. (See also the war between the “Great Proprietors” and “white Indians” in Maine.) The sudden privatization of a great deal of public land would probably lead to courtroom scheming and corporate consolidation — to supercharged nepotism.
But the underlying problem remains: The federal ownership of 80% of a state makes the federal government something that it shouldn’t be, a general government that engages in large-scale domestic regulation.
We don’t do political debate, anymore, having traded it for the emotionally coded volleying of cultural symbols, but this is a topic that demands more significant discussion and a journey to first principles. I doubt that we can answer this question, because I doubt that we’re equipped to engage in this kind of sustained discussion anymore, but how much land should the federal government own? And what are the alternatives?
This one is tough because all sides are being incredibly dumb.
We're not going to build low-income housing in the middle of miles of untamed forest. Stop pretending this is about housing.
If you want to sell land, tell everybody specifically what land you want to sell. "We'll figure it out later" is something I NEVER trust the government with.
On the other hand, the idea the government has to own 80% of Nevada forever is also stupid. We have PLENTY of land that can be sold without issue, but this brings us back to 2.
It would be FAR easier/cheaper/better to revitalize the hollowed-out husks of existing towns -- but that might lead to some inconvenient discussions about WHY those towns/neighborhoods are hollowed-out in the first place.
And of course, the biggest issue is this is supposedly going to raise like $10 billion, which is like an afternoon of spending for government. We could also JUST PRINT THE $10 billion -- which is how we handle every other issue. Without actually tackling the spending, we're just throwing pebbles into the river.
I don't think the Feds should own all that land. I did not agree with Mike Lee, however, that the land is needed for "affordable housing." That (for people I know) was the sticking point, not the selling of it per se. Much of the land is leased for ranching/grazing, etc, and I certainly wouldn't mind it being sold for those uses, and/or for the states to decide on good use for it themselves. (I know a lot of what was proposed was the hopscotch squares that aren't contiguous to other federal land.) But affordable housing?!
We don't need "affordable housing" (which always becomes a slum) - we need to get the illegals out to free up existing housing that is literally everywhere being taken up by 20 million people who shouldn't be here. Even if we "just" deport people who have been here illegally 5 years or less and all the ones with criminal records or prior deportation orders, that frees up a ton of housing.