I thought Trump's Big, Beautiful Bungholes bill is trying to seize up land for the gov't across the US and that includes Utah? Fed calls dibs!
250+ million acres of public lands eligible for sale in SENR budget reconciliation package
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
40 points (100.0% liked)
News
30265 readers
4013 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I don't know what the map behind the guy is showing, but if it's showing the distribution of federal (maybe just BLM?) land, he's got a point. Like, maybe the answer isn't "make public lands non-public", and should be "make non-public lands public", but some states contribute a great deal more than others do to the share of pool of public lands. Those states can't make full economic use of a lot of their land, when other states don't have that constraint.
Here's a list with percentages. Utah has the third-highest percentage of public land in the US, at 75.2% of their territory.
https://www.summitpost.org/public-and-private-land-percentages-by-us-states/186111
At the other end, you have states like Rhode Island (which I can sort of understand, as it was one of the first states and has a high population density) at 1.5% public land, and Kansas at 1.9% public land. Kansas doesn't have Rhode Island's excuse. If you're Utah, you're probably going to be pretty grouchy if you're looking at Kansas and comparing your own situation.
kagis
Yeah, sounds like that's what people are arguing about.
https://gardner.utah.edu/blog/economics-public-lands/
The authors, which include three researchers from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, found that (1) on average, federal lands are not likely to be as economically productive as private lands, (2) states are likely to have management costs equivalent to federal agencies, and (3) states can cover land management costs with land-based revenues if they have access to fossil fuels and timber resources, and prices for these commodities are relatively high.
I'm not sure how relevant it is to compare public land in Utah against the smallest state in the nation, Rhode Island. Most of Utah is 'unihabitable' desert just like Nevada and Arizona which is why so much land can be undeveloped, another aspect states like RI don't have to contend with.