The country’s top land managers testified before U.S. senators Wednesday to defend sweeping budget cuts for the nation’s public lands and a plan to sell 3.3 million acres managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management so communities can build housing.
The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday published a provision for the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill requiring the Forest Service to sell between 965,000 and 1.45 million of its 193 million acres and the Bureau of Land Management to sell between 1.23 million and 1.84 million of its 245 million acres to encourage development of housing. The House last month stripped a plan to sell public lands in Nevada from its version of the budget bill.
The new provision’s mandatory disposal of federal lands for housing focuses on 11 Western states, including Colorado. The legislation directs land managers to publish lists of tracts for sale every 60 days with priority for parcels that are nominated by states or local governments, are adjacent to developed areas, have access to existing infrastructure and are suitable for residential development.
“This is not about our most sacred and beautiful places,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told the committee Wednesday. “This is often about barren land next to highways with existing billboards that have no recreational value.”
Burgum is leading a $900 million reduction in funding for the National Park Service that could close as many as 350 of the Park Service’s 433 sites.
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz is overseeing one of the most drastic overhauls of the land management agency in its 150-year history, with a presidential call for increased logging and mineral extraction from public lands coinciding with a steep reduction in staff and funding.
The Trump administration’s 2026 budget published this month calls for a $392 million cut from the Forest Service management budget, $303 million from grant programs supporting non-federal forests and a $391 million cut to forest operations. The cuts — outlining the “highest priorities in forest management” of timber sales, hazardous fuels removal, mineral extraction, grazing and wildlife habitat management — move the Forest Service toward a goal “of restoring federalism by empowering states to assume a great role in managing forest lands within their borders.”
National Forest lands, Schultz told the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, “are a bountiful resource for minerals” and the agency has a fiduciary responsibility to the American public to better steward tax dollars wisely.
He said the budget cuts for the Forest Service are intended to “better balance the appropriate roles of federal and state government.” The $303 million termination of funding for partnerships with states, tribes and conservation groups to protect non-federal forests is part of that balance, he said.
“It is not our intent to degrade the services of state and local governments but we must change the reliance on the federal government to fund or deliver these services,” said Schultz, whose career at state land agencies in Idaho and Montana makes him the first Forest Service chief to not rise up through the ranks of the federal agency. “In alignment with restoring federalism, we encourage increased state authority to fund management of state and privately owned forests, community preparedness and public risk mitigation activities.”
Overall, the 2026 budget cuts $1.39 billion from the Forest Service budget, including $300 million from the Forest and Rangeland Research Program and $303 million from state, local, Tribal and nonprofit conservation partnership programs.
“The president has pledged to manage national forests for their intended purpose of producing timber,” the budget proposal reads. An April memo from the Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins issued an emergency declaration calling for increased logging on 112.6 million Forest Service acres — about 59% of all Forest Service lands — to reduce wildfire risk and “support the durability and resiliency of forests.”
The emergency declaration allows logging companies to avoid lengthy public scrutiny and environmental review.
Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who chairs the influential appropriations committee, countered the administration’s emphasis on extraction and revenue with a reminder of the Forest Service’s longstanding motto: “Caring for the Land and Serving People,” that embraces a mission that includes protection of natural resources, forestry research, community assistance and supporting a strong workforce, all of which are being slashed in the Trump plan.
(The Wilderness Society — joining several environmental groups critical of the plan for increased logging — called the memo “another ruthless attack” and an attempt “to hand over our public forests to private industry.”)
Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, displayed a chart showing a 50% reduction in 2025 federal grants for forestry work, habitat restoration, stewardship and community partnerships to protect open space with a near doubling of personnel costs to cover payments for Forest Service workers who took the early retirement buyouts. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget cuts the 10 Forest Service conservation partnership programs to zero.
“Isn’t it a betrayal of the relationship (between Congress and the Forest Service) to be cutting programs in half in preparation for shutting them down completely when the vision has not been laid out by Congress to do so?” Merkley said.
The senators also expressed concern over a fundamental reorganization of the country’s firefighting capacities, shifting wildfire teams from the Forest Service over to the Department of Interior and the new Federal Wildland Fire Service.
“This budget seems designed to not augment the work of the Forest Service and its model but to undermine the work of the Forest Service,” said Murkowski. “Let’s get back to a vision of caring for the land and serving the people.”
“Strategic” land sales could pay for deferred maintenance
Down the hall Wednesday in the U.S. Capitol at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Burgum argued in support of his plan to cut $900 million from the National Park Service operations budget and more than 5,000 full-time Park Service positions. Burgum said “strategic” sales of public lands could offset Interior budget cuts.
“The National Park Service responsibilities include a large number of sites that are not ‘national parks’ in the traditionally understood sense, many of which receive small numbers of mostly local visitors, and are better categorized and managed as state-level parks,” the Trump budget reads.
The cuts are part of a 30% annual reduction in the Interior Department’s 2025 budget.
Burgum said selling acreage of federal land could help offset those cuts. Land sales would help alleviate housing shortages in Western states, he said, and pay for a “massive” backlog of deferred maintenance on Park Service and Bureau of Land Management properties.
“One of the ways to solve for some of the deferred maintenance is to be strategic in how we dispose of federal lands and recirculate those dollars into improving the recreational opportunities and the educational opportunities for our citizens,” Burgum said, promising to hold public meetings before any sales and noting “there won’t be an acre” from any of the nation’s 63 parks offered for sale.
Also this week the Justice Department published a legal opinion that allows presidents to revoke prior presidential declarations of national monuments, overturning a 1938 opinion saying presidents using the Antiquities Act can only create, not abolish, national monuments. The determination opens the door for President Donald Trump to reduce the size — or even cancel designations — of national monuments created by previous presidents. (Seventeen presidents have used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create 160 national monuments.)
The land sale proposal — as well as budget cuts to the Park Service and Forest Service — is being blasted by environmental and conservation groups who point to soaring visitation and rural economies relying on public lands. The Mountain Pact — an 11-year-old coalition of more than 100 Western communities advocating for improved federal climate and outdoor recreation policy — last month sent a letter to D.C. lawmakers signed by more than 300 Western local elected officials supporting public lands. More than 175 of those officials were from Colorado’s high country.
“Our public lands are the heart of our communities and the backbone of our economy,” Mountain Pact Executive Director Anna Peterson said in a statement this week. “We are outraged and deeply concerned that a cadre of Republicans are continuing their outrageous push to sell-off millions of acres of our public lands to pay for tax cuts for rich people. This reckless proposal would be devastating to the outdoor economy, and would trade one of our nation’s greatest investments for the short-term financial gain of an elite few.”