A prominent pro-Trump senator is coming out against one of the more controversial provisions proposed for President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill."
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Punchbowl News congressional reporter Max Cohen that the plan by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to sell off portions of federally-owned land to build housing is a dead letter as far as he is concerned.
“I oppose it. The way it’s written right now, it’s not going to pass," he said.
Lee tried to win over Daines's vote by exempting Montana from the sale of public lands, but to no avail.
Public land is an issue that starkly divides the east and west of the United States. In many western states, an outright majority of land is owned by the federal government through various agencies, as a result of the unique way in which this area was settled during westward expansion. It's a commonly debated issue, with many westerners supporting the system as preserving free movement and natural beauty, and others seeing it as a federal intrusion on their way of life.
The public lands sell-off is one of many ideas added to the bill to offset the impact of Trump-supported tax cuts for the ultrawealthy on the federal deficit.
Lee and his supporters maintain that the bill contains a number of exemptions, protecting national parks, national monuments, wildlife preserves, and a number of other specifically defined categories, to the point that less than 1 percent of federal land would be sold under this proposal.
However, land under the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are not automatically exempted under the proposal, leading to the potential sale of as much as 3 million acres in 11 states, including, Grist noted, "parts of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state, the Buffalo Hills Wilderness Study Area in Nevada, and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona."