The sale of public lands was taken out of the budget bill by the Senate. (Courtesy of the Architect of the U.S. Capitol)

A proposal to sell some public lands as part of the U.S. Senate’s version of a budget reconciliation bill was downscaled and subsequently scrapped altogether.

Mike Lee, R-Utah, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman, initially proposed to sell 0.5-0.75% of Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management land in 11 Western states, in part to help make housing more affordable.

Amid opposition including from Western conservatives — such as Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, both R-Idaho — Lee revised the proposal to only include BLM land that would be used for housing or related infrastructure within five miles of population centers. The revision called for selling 0.25-0.5% of BLM land.

Lee withdrew the land-sale proposal altogether late June 28.

The downscaled proposal did not allay the concerns of the Idaho Conservation League, public lands and wildlife director John Robison told Capital Press. The revision did not define what a population center would look like and had inadequate public review provisions, for example.

“Public lands should not be considered an account for the ultra-wealthy,” he said, referring to the idea that selling some public land could help fund parts of the budget bill.

BLM land fairly close to populated areas provides access to several popular Idaho recreation sites, from Lake Coeur d’Alene in the north and Henrys Fork of the Snake River in the southeast to parts of the Owyhee Canyonlands in the southwest, Robison said.

“This was a wrongheaded proposal that had no place in this reconciliation bill,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, R-Wash., a  senior member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. “Many Western senators who know the value of recreational lands objected to its inclusion. I am glad our special places will still be available to everyone.”

Lee, in a post on social media platform X, wrote that while there has been a “tremendous amount of misinformation — and in some cases, outright lies — about my bill, many people brought forward serious concerns.”

Because of the strict constraints of the budget reconciliation process, he was “unable to secure clear, enforceable standards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families,” he wrote.

“I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land — land it is mismanaging and in many cases ruining for the next generation,” Lee wrote. Under some U.S. presidents, swaths of the West have been “locked away from the people who live there, with no meaningful recourse. That has real consequences from Utahns — from raising taxes for schools and funding local search-and-rescue operations to being able to build homes and sustain rural communities.”

President Donald Trump promised to put underutilized federal land to work for American families and “I look forward to helping him achieve that in a way that respects the legacy of our public lands and reflects the values of the people who use them most,” Lee wrote.