Who benefits – and who loses – when public lands become private

EEach 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 Sen. Mike Lee of Utah proposed adding a provision to President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” to auction off millions of acres of public lands in Western states. Originally intended to provide housing and tax debt relief for Americans, it was the largest federal land sale proposed to date. Ultimately, the provision was removed before the bill passed. 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 released an analysis showing that the Trump administration had already begun taking actions that could collectively eliminate or weaken protections for more than 175 million acres of American land. With these large-scale privatization measures intensifying, it is worth examining what these places actually offer to individuals versus businesses.

As an environmental scientist who studies the complex interaction between humans and nature, I decided to analyze the costs and benefits of selling public lands, focusing on this failed provision as an example. I used established data analysis methods in my field to evaluate publicly available data sets previously published in peer-reviewed journals and synthesize these data to illuminate the broader implications of recent policy proposals and policy movements. The results clearly show that these lands are not suitable for the development of affordable housing. Moreover, turning these lands over to private owners means losing a host of crucial ecological benefits – from sustaining the pollinators that underpin our food supply to cleaning the air we breathe – that intact ecosystems provide without any direct cost or effort to us.

On supporting science journalism

If you enjoy this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Conflicts over public lands in the United States have deep roots. In the 1970s, ranchers, extractive industry groups, county officials and allied Western politicians, later backed by President Ronald Reagan, organized 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 the states and facilitating the extraction of timber, minerals, coal, oil and other natural resources from those lands.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 goes further in efforts to control public lands and exploit their natural resources. It presents a plan to roll back what is called the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. 30×30 initiative protect and manage 30% of the planet’s land, freshwater, and oceans by 2030 (Trump has already canceled the United States’ 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 land interests to safeguard natural areas, water resources and cultural heritage and provide recreational opportunities since 1965. Bill 2025 also seeks to weaken the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to protect federal lands of scientific, historical or cultural significance by designating them as national monuments. To this end, the Justice Department recently ruled that the president has the authority to revoke national monuments, and the Interior Department has launched broad reviews of monuments with an eye toward extractive industry development.

The now-defunct public land sale provision in the Trump administration’s bill, also known as the budget reconciliation bill, would have made more than a quarter of a billion acres of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in 11 Western states eligible for sale and would have required the sale of two to three million acres within five years. The provision required any land sold to be developed for housing and related infrastructure, a restriction that would expire after 10 years.

Supporters have touted the sale as a solution to America’s affordable housing crisis, although the provision contains no affordability requirements nor does it specify who could purchase the land. Could selling federal land really solve the affordable housing problem? And what are the ecological tradeoffs of converting millions of acres of public land for development? There’s a lot to be said for massive sales. Let’s look at the data.

To test the claim that the Trump proposal would solve the housing crisis, I assessed whether these lands were even suitable for development, focusing on affordability and wildfire risk. I looked specifically at the area of ​​overlap between accessibility and fire probability, using previously published accessibility datasets, which calculate travel time based on proximity to urban centers and infrastructure, as well as fire risk on land eligible for sale.

I expected these landscapes to be isolated and prone to wildfire, but the degree of inaccessibility and risk of wildfire is staggering. Even if a developer were able to convince an insurer to underwrite such a project, these homes would remain out of reach for the working families who most need affordable housing, because most public land is not located near the infrastructure needed to build affordable homes. or the employment agencies where most Americans work.

Only 3.5 percent of this land is within an hour’s drive of a city. Only 0.7 percent are within a 30-minute drive; 30.5 percent are one to three hours away; 33.4 percent are three to six hours apart; and 32.6 percent sit more than six hours from urban centers. When it comes to fire risk, 18 percent of the targeted acres are in low burn probability areas, almost all of them in Alaska. More than 52 percent fall into high or very high fire risk categories.

Much of this land is in areas with a low probability of burning: could this be a viable option for housing? No. Only 0.3 percent of the acreage offered for sale combines low fire risk with a commute of less than 30 minutes, and 81 percent of that tiny fraction is in Alaska, which has no shortage of land for development. Of the 18 percent of targeted acres classified as low risk, 55 percent are more than six hours from the nearest city; 24 percent sit for three to six hours; 19 percent are between one and three hours away.

Next, I set out to calculate the ecological cost of privatization. To do this, we need to understand what ecosystems exist on public lands that were eligible for sale and examine the benefits they provide to people, also known as ecosystem services. A land cover analysis using the National Land Cover Database reveals that approximately 137 million acres, or 53.8 percent, are scrub/scrub; about 65 million acres, or 25.3 percent, are evergreen forests; and about 27 million acres, or 10.5 percent, are grassland and herbaceous communities. These three ecosystems represent almost 90 percent of the land eligible for sale.

Drawing on ecosystem service values ​​calculated from more than 1,500 biome valuation studies from around the world, I estimated the annual value of services provided by forests, shrubs/brush, and grass/herbaceous areas earmarked for sale and development. In total, the ecosystems of these lands generate approximately $507.4 billion in benefits to the public each year.

Pollination alone accounts for $236.2 billion of that total. This service that underpins our agriculture and wild ecosystems. About 35 percent of global agricultural production, and 87 of 115 major crops, depend on pollinators. Nearly 90 percent of wildflowering plants also depend on them. Public lands in the western United States, which support an immense diversity of pollinators, offer enormous value in this regard.

Pollination is relatively simple to conceptualize as a benefit because it provides us with food, which is traded in our markets. But ecosystems offer much more than market values. One example is existence and legacy value, which is the value people derive from simply knowing that an ecosystem exists, now and for future generations. Public lands that were to be sold generate $46.5 billion in this category.

Part of the existence/inheritance value is linked to another service: the maintenance of genetic diversity. Simply put, ecosystems support biodiversity. An analysis of species richness data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature shows that land eligible for sale under the Big Beautiful Bill provision supports an average of 261 species of amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles per 7,500 acres, of which about five species are threatened. By maintaining this diversity, these lands generate a value of $9.7 billion per year.

Regulating water flows is another vital, albeit invisible, service provided by public lands ecosystems, providing more than $31.4 billion according to this analysis. By storing precipitation and snowmelt, moderating flooding, maintaining base flows, recharging aquifers, and regulating water quality, these ecosystems support life downstream. A rough analysis of the National Watershed Boundary dataset, specifically the watershed-dependent population (excluding Alaska due to data constraints), shows that more than 21,000 watersheds intersect these lands, with an average of 6,000 people dependent on each. Dependency peaks in Arizona (which has 16,400 dependents per watershed), California (15,600 dependents per watershed), and Nevada (4,500 dependents per watershed). This heavy reliance is not surprising given that much of the western United States’ water supply comes from high-elevation headwaters dominated by snowmelt, particularly in the Rocky Mountains.

Our ecosystems also filter pollutants, such as particulate matter, carbon monoxide and ozone, out of our atmosphere and provide clean air to billions of people around the world. This service is particularly important given estimates that air pollutants caused by the combustion of fossil fuels alone are responsible for more than eight million premature deaths each year. The land offered for sale helps regulate air quality worth $29.5 billion per year.

Additionally, these places provide the public with recreational and tourism opportunities, which are expected to generate more than $11.6 billion annually from land offered for sale and an additional $25.7 billion when adding the aesthetic value they provide. They include ecosystems located in some of the most popular and iconic national forests and BLM lands, such as Nine Mile Canyon, Behind the Rocks Wilderness Study Area, White River National Forest, Deschutes National Forest, Tahoe National Forest, and Angeles National Forest.

Analysis of national digital trails and recreation information databases shows that these landscapes alone contain nearly 56,500 miles of trails, nearly 2,000 recreational facilities, and more than 300 designated recreation areas. Together, they offer 10,000 recreational opportunities consisting of 93 activities, including hiking, camping, fishing and hunting. These spaces for sport, relaxation, enrichment and creativity are enjoyed by the American public and international visitors, contributing to our health and well-being and supporting the many recreation-dependent rural communities in the Western United States.

A A simple, data-driven review of this sales proposition reveals its true intent and losses. The administration wants to sell our land to companies to make profits. Proceeds from the proposed sale of this land would have financed tax cuts benefiting mainly the ultra-rich. For the average person, this would have been a terrible deal. These hundreds of millions of acres of public land are neither accessible nor safe enough to solve our affordable housing crisis: Most parcels are hours from any urban center, and the risk of wildfire is enormous. If development ever occurs on these lands, it will not house working-class families but will line the pockets of corporations and speculators, effectively imposing a regressive tax on the rest of us. What is at risk of disappearing are not “barren wastelands,” as proponents of public land sales often describe them, but vibrant, diverse ecosystems that provide hundreds of billions of dollars in vital services to the public each year. Far from solving the housing crisis, this plan would worsen inequality and erode the ecological systems that support us.

Value is an ambiguous term. For the businesses and politicians supporting this selloff, it comes down to what will increase next quarter’s gross domestic product. But for the rest of us, it encompasses clean water, abundant food, ecological stability, cultural heritage, opportunities for future generations, and the wonder these landscapes provide.