Sierra Club Utah Chapter: Senator Lee’s Public Lands Sell Off is Bad for Everyone but Billionaires

SALT LAKE CITY, UT -Utah Senator Mike Lee is supercharging an effort to sell huge swaths of public lands to private developers in Utah to pay for extending Donald Trump's tax cuts for billionaires.

"Senator Lee doesn't care about what Utahns want. Periodt. We made it abundantly clear over the past month that our public lands are not for sale, yet, Senator Lee led the charge to put land sales back on the table in the Senate version of Trump's Very Bad, No Good Budget Bill." said Franque Bains, Utah Sierra Club Chapter Director.

Last night, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee released its revised portion of the sprawling GOP budget reconciliation package. The text not only reinstates language mandating the sale of public lands in Utah, but vastly increases the acreage of those required sales. Utahns value public lands-not just for their economic contributions through sustainable tourism and recreation, but as irreplaceable cultural, environmental, and communal resources. They are places where families take their kids to camp, fish, and hunt. Poll after poll shows that privatizing these shared places is incredibly unpopular-In a 2025 Colorado Collegepoll, only 16% of voters in Utah supported selling some limited areas of national public lands for housing.

The new language would force the sale of potentially millions of acres of public landsmanaged by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, far more than the approximately 500,000 acres of land sales in Nevada and Utah called for in the original House version of the budget reconciliation bill. That language, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, was stricken from the House version of the billin the face of bipartisan opposition in the chamber and overwhelming public outrage.

Bains continued,"This bill would give billionaires and corporate polluters free rein to drill, mine, and log our treasured landscapes without oversight or accountability, and sell millions of acres of public lands to private developers, locking out American families forever. Utahns will remember Mike Lee's betrayal of the American people."

About the Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is America's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, with millions of members and supporters. In addition to protecting every person's right to get outdoors and access the healing power of nature, the Sierra Club works to promote clean energy, safeguard the health of our communities, protect wildlife, and preserve our remaining wild places through grassroots activism, public education, lobbying, and legal action. For more information, visit https://www.sierraclub.org.