The New Yorker:

Republican senators inserted (and later removed) a measure in the tax-and-spending bill that would have required the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to sell more than two million acres of publicly owned land in the next five years, ostensibly to “decrease housing costs for millions of Americans.”

Q: How bad is it?

Peter Slevin, Chicago-based contributing writer who covers politics: Not bad at all, in fact. Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, withdrew his proposal after a cadre of Western conservatives vowed to defeat even a watered-down version. The land sales would have included only a tiny percentage of the roughly six hundred and fifty million acres managed by the federal government, but opponents were deeply skeptical of the motives and the vaguely worded guidelines for what lands would be sold and for which purposes. Conservatives in Montana were so incensed by Lee’s first attempt that the Senate proposal exempted the state in favor of eleven other Western states. “Once the land is sold, we will never get it back. God isn’t creating more land,” Representative Ryan Zinke, the Montana Republican who successfully stripped a similar provision from the House version of the bill, said. On social media, Lee wrote that, while he failed this time, he will work with President Trump “to put underutilized federal land to work for American families.” But, for now, the backlash from his own party kept the acreage out of private hands and securely under federal control.

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