The US Constitution (as written)
forbids the federal government to own land beyond what it needs to
function. It allows the federal
government to own land for military bases and offices. No Amendment has ever
been proposed or ratified to change the Constitution and allow the federal
government the right to own land. – Norb Leahy
Last January, during what now seem
like the halcyon days of the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump and his son
Donald, Jr., sat down for an interview with Field & Stream at
the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show, in Las Vegas. The discussion,
though brief, was packed with vintage Republican rhetoric.
The elder Trump declared himself “very much into energy” and “very much into fracking
and drilling,” called gun violence “a mental-health problem,” decried President
Obama’s frequent use of executive orders (“you have to go through Congress”),
and twice noted that New York City had awarded him one of its ultra-scarce
concealed-carry handgun permits. The younger Trump talked about how “hunting
and fishing kept me out of so much other trouble I would’ve gotten into
throughout my life.”
On one point, however, the Trumps
departed from G.O.P. dogma. Asked whether the federal government should
transfer some of the six hundred and forty million acres of public land it
manages to state control, Trump demurred. “I don’t like the idea because I want
to keep the lands great,” he said. Trump, Jr., spoke of “refunding” public
lands in order to improve maintenance, and preserving hunting access by keeping
them out of private hands. Compare that with the Republican
Party platform, released seven months later, which
called it “absurd” for “official Washington” to control so much acreage, and
enjoined Congress to “immediately pass universal legislation” redressing the
issue.
Trump’s enthusiasm for energy
development and his stated opposition to land transfers are shared by his pick
for Secretary of the Interior, the Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, whose
nomination was approved on Tuesday morning by the Senate Energy and Natural
Resources Committee and will soon be taken up by the full Senate. “I am
absolutely against transfer or sale of public lands,” he said in response to a
question from Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, during his recent
committee hearings. “I can’t be more clear.” Zinke’s voting record shows the
same.
For now, however, the “refunding” of public lands seems to be a low
priority for the Administration. Last week, in one of a number of high-profile
orders, Trump instituted a ninety-day hiring freeze across the executive
brancha heavy blow to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land
Management, the National Park Service, and other chronically short-staffed
agencies. According to a recent survey by the nonprofit Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility, more than ninety per cent of
wildlife-refuge managers report that they lack the staffing to fulfill their
core conservation mission. One B.L.M. employee, responding to a related survey, said, “I have
1.8 million acres of land in my field office to manage and I am the only
natural-resources staff member.” The Interior Department, which oversees these
agencies, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Tuesday morning.
Congress, meanwhile, has been
quietly pursuing the vision laid out in the G.O.P. platform. Current rules
require that any legislation that costs the federal government money must be
offset by budget cuts or new sources of revenue. Under a measure passed in
early January as part of a House rules package, however, all federal-land
transfers will be labelled as cost-free. Rob Bishop, the Utah congressman who
proposed the measure, has said that fears of extensive land transfers are
“bullshit,” and that he and his colleagues have simply eliminated a “stupid
accounting trick”—a reference to the Congressional Budget Office’s method of
assessing the value of public lands, long the subject of partisan disagreement.
But Bishop, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, is one of the
most powerful members of a movement dedicated to weakening federal management
of Western lands, and that movement has lately pressed the advantages it gained
in the November election.
Senator Orrin Hatch and Governor Gary Herbert, both
of Utah, are backing a bid for the B.L.M. directorship by Mike Noel, a current
state representative and former bureau staffer known for his fervent commitment
to land transfers and his extreme disdain for his onetime employer. (Appointing
Noel as B.L.M. director “would be like having an atheist teach Sunday school,”
the former director Pat Shea told
the Salt Lake Tribune.)
Last week, Representative Jason Chaffetz, also of Utah, introduced a bill that
would transfer 3.3 million acres of public land across ten states, drawing
protests from conservation and hunting groups.
The political tension over federal land
ownership goes back a long way. In the century or so after the founding of the
republic, the U.S. government acquired 1.8 billion acres of land, culminating
in 1867 with the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Some two-thirds of those acres
were eventually disposed—transferred to state and private hands in order to
raise money and encourage settlement. But, from the beginning, some lands were
reserved for public schools, military bases, and other purposes deemed in the
national interest.
In 1872, the creation of Yellowstone
National Park began a tradition of setting
aside some federally managed land for recreation and conservation. Today, most
public land lies within the borders of a dozen Western states, where it is
variously grazed, mined, and logged by private permittees; covered with wind
turbines, solar panels, and drilling rigs by the same; and protected from
development in the form of national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, and
wilderness areas. By law, it is managed through a public process that, while
highly imperfect and often agonizingly slow, is intended to reflect the
country’s changing values.
For generations, however, some
Westerners—and their political leaders—have viewed this land as Washington’s
hostage.
In the eighteen-nineties, when
Congress established the first public-land forest reserves, one Colorado
newspaper encouraged its readers to “arise in your might and protest this
damnable outrage.” A Colorado cattleman told the Denver Chamber of Commerce
that the reserves were an act of tyranny “not equaled since the days of William
the Conqueror.” Eighty years later, outraged by a wave of new environmental
laws, anti-federal Westerners mounted the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion,
bulldozing a road into a Utah canyon proposed for wilderness protection and
issuing death threats to agency staffers. Ronald Reagan, campaigning in Utah in
1980, told supporters to “count me in as a rebel.”
The rebellion has resurfaced
periodically since then, perhaps most dramatically early last year, when a
group of armed extremists, led by the brothers Ammon
and Ryan Bundy, took over the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge, in southern Oregon, for forty-one days. One of their first
actions was to cover the refuge sign with one that said “Harney County Resource
Center.” At the time, Bishop pointedly refused to condemn the takeover, instead
blaming the situation on “what we feel is the abuse of individuals by the
land-management agencies.” Trump, then on the campaign trail, was more
critical, though back in 2014 he complimented the Bundys’ father, Cliven, who
had been involved in an armed confrontation with law enforcement over his
two-decade-long refusal to pay grazing fees on public lands in Nevada. “I like
him,” Trump said. “I like his spirit. I like his spunk.”
There are plenty of grounds for
civil disagreement over the management of public lands. But the argument for
large-scale federal-land disposal makes little legal, financial, or practical
sense. The government’s constitutional right to own and hold property has been upheld by the Supreme Court. The fees that federal agencies
charge for grazing, mining, and other extractive activities are heavily
subsidized, and would almost certainly rise were the land transferred to states
or counties.
The job of managing so many millions
of acres would also place a heavy burden on state and local governments—two
hundred and eighty million dollars a year just in Utah, according to a 2014
study by economists from three of the state’s universities. In addition, a mass
land transfer would likely lead to environmental disaster, much as unregulated
grazing of the Western range in the early nineteen-hundreds caused chronic
erosion and helped create the Dust Bowl. The states’-rights argument is also
morally dubious: in response to the Bundy brothers’ stated determination to
give Malheur back to its rightful owners, Charlotte Roderique, the chairwoman
of the Burns Paiute Native American tribe, said, drily, “I’m sitting here
trying to write an acceptance letter for when they return all this land to us.”
The land-transfer movement is, at
its heart, an expression of frustration. The arid interior West has never been
an easy place to make a living off the land, and the Western myth of
self-sufficiency has always been underwritten by federal subsidies and supported
by federal infrastructure. In states like Utah and Nevada, where more than half
the land within state borders is managed by the federal government, the feds
have become a convenient scapegoat for an impossible climate, an unattainable
cultural ideal, and a changing economy. To say that these objections are born
of frustration, however, is not to say that they pose no threat. Frustration,
as we saw on November 8th, can have real political consequences.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-will-become-of-federal-public-lands-under-trump
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