Scientific American: The True Worth of America’s Public Lands

An environmental scientist’s analysis reveals who will win and who will lose in the push to put federal land into private hands

By Kyle Manley, Published February 17, 2026, Scientific American

Every year more than 12 million people visit the White River National Forest in central Colorado to ski, hike, bike, fish, camp and otherwise enjoy this iconic 2.3-million-acre landscape. As part of the public lands system, the forest is collectively owned by the American people and managed by the federal government on our behalf. Recently Senate Republicans tried to make half of it eligible for sale.

The move came last June, when Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposed adding a provision into President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” to auction off millions of acres of public lands across the Western states. Nominally intended to provide housing and fiscal debt relief to Americans, it was the largest proposed sell-off of federal lands to date. Ultimately the provision was stripped prior to the bill’s passage into law. But this won’t be the last attempt to dismantle public lands and hand them over to private companies. In September 2025 the Center for American Progress published an analysis showing that the Trump administration had already begun taking actions that could collectively eliminate or weaken protections from more than 175 million acres of U.S. lands. With such mass-scale privatization measures ramping up, it’s worth examining what these places actually provide to people versus corporations.

As an environmental scientist who studies the complex interplay between humans and nature, I decided to analyze the costs and benefits of public land sell-offs, focusing on this failed provision as an example. I used established methods of data analysis in my field to assess publicly available datasets previously published in peer-reviewed journals and synthesize these data to illuminate the broader implications of recent policy proposals and political movements. The findings make clear that these lands are ill-suited to development for affordable housing. What is more, putting these lands in private hands means losing the host of crucial ecological benefits—from sustaining the pollinators that underpin our food supply to purifying the air we breathe—that intact ecosystems provide at no direct cost or effort to us.

Conflicts over public lands in the U.S. have deep roots. In the 1970s ranchers, extractive-industry groups, county officials and allied Western politicians, later endorsed by President Ronald Reagan, staged the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion to wrest control of hundreds of millions of acres from the federal government. In 2016 the GOP platform openly called for transferring federal lands to states and facilitating the extraction of timber, minerals, coal, oil, and other natural resources from these lands.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint goes further in the effort to control public lands and exploit their natural resources. It lays out a plan to roll back the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s so-called 30 × 30 initiative to protect and manage 30 percent of the world’s land, fresh waters and oceans by 2030 (Trump has already rescinded the U.S.’s 30 X 30 commitments by executive order). It calls for gutting the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that has funded the acquisition of land and interest in land to safeguard natural areas, water resources and cultural heritage and to provide recreation opportunities since 1965. Project 2025 also aims to weaken the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to protect federal lands of scientific, historic or cultural significance by designating them as national monuments. To that end, the Department of Justice recently ruled the president has the authority to revoke national monuments, and the Department of the Interior has begun broad reviews of monuments with an eye toward development of extractive industry.

Read more at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-privatizing-public-land-wont-solve-the-housing-crisis/