Widespread backlash killed Mike Lee’s plan to sell public lands. Utah state leaders are undeterred.

Utah’s political leadership is regrouping after three failed attempts to wrest public lands from the federal government this year.

But the state has signaled that it is “just getting started,” per a tweet by Sen. Mike Lee, and will continue its decades-long battle to control lands managed by agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

“Would we like to bring them under state management? Absolutely,” said Redge Johnson, director of Public Land Policy Coordinating Office (PLPCO), “because we think we can give better guidance.”

In some ways, the odds couldn’t be more in Utah’s favor. It has a conservative U.S. Supreme Court with a proven willingness to upend longstanding precedent. It has a White House administration that has already committed to changing the rules that govern public lands and slashed the budgets and personnel of the agencies that manage them. And it has a Republican majority in Congress.

But shifting politics in the West, along with a surge in Americans visiting and bonding with public lands in the region, has also created more barriers.

In January, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s case arguing the BLM should sell off 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” lands in the state with no designated use. This spring, Rep. Celeste Maloy failed to insert language into Congress’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that would have sold off federal lands in southern Utah to support water infrastructure.

Lee also failed to insert language into that same bill that would have sold off a portion of public lands for housing across the West. He faced massive public backlash over the move, including from social media campaigns led by hunting and angling groups.

So, where does Utah go from here in its fight against federal ownership of public lands?

The land Utah wants

The “debacle” over Lee’s proposal, Johnson said, “has pointed out to people how important it is for the state of Utah to appropriately message about what we’re trying to do and what our intentions are.”

While the state wants management control of nearly all its federal public lands, Johnson emphasized leadership wants those properties to remain open to public use.

“When I say ‘public lands,’ that’s areas where we go to recreate, hunt, fish, camp, those kinds of things,” Johnson said. “There’s nobody I know in state government that wants to sell those public lands.”

The few select tracts it would consider disposing to private interests, along the lines of Lee’s proposal, would be small, Johnson said.

His agency has identified roughly 60,000 acres of BLM land across the state, Johnson said, not vast tracts of popular recreation lands that prompted public outcry from a broad group of opponents that included environmentalists, hunters, and even Lee’s fellow Western-state Republicans in Congress.

After accounting for soil conditions, slope and proximity to utilities, only about 7,000 acres would actually be suitable for development, Johnson said. A lot of them are checkerboard parcels surrounded by state and private land.

“Even people at BLM get frustrated when they have those island parcels inside city limits,” Johnson said, “because it’s where people go and just throw out mattresses or throw their yard stuff, or kids start fires with fireworks.”

Gov. Spencer Cox has also expressed interest in some of these parcels to prevent rapidly growing cities from gobbling up prime farmland, Johnson added.

“Why can’t we use those for housing,” he said, “and try to take some of the pressure off of our communities and agriculture?”

Mechanisms already exist, Johnson conceded, for federal agencies to “dispose” of their lands and sell them to the state or private interests. Initiatives like Lee’s, however, would make the process quicker.

While Lee’s effort fell short, the Trump administration has signaled that it could speed up the privatization process on its own.

What the Trump admin could do

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced a joint task force on “using underutilized federal Land suitable for housing” in March.

But as of this month, the task force has not produced any findings, said Michael Carroll, BLM campaign director for The Wilderness Society, a nonprofit land conservation group.

“We have heard nothing about if they are making progress,” he said.

The secretaries published a March op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the task force would “increase housing supply and decrease costs for millions of Americans.” HUD would determine areas with pressing housing needs, while Interior would find public lands suitable for housing.

Later that month, Jon Raby, the BLM’s acting director, said the task force was looking at using federal lands within 10 miles of population centers greater than 5,000 people — about 400,000 acres — for housing across the country, Bloomberg Law reported.

Burgum and Turner said that the task force would reduce red tape surrounding land transfers. “This isn’t a free-for-all to build on federal lands, although we recognize that bad-faith critics will likely call it that,” they wrote.

Carroll called it just another noodle in a “spaghetti-on-the-wall approach” to privatize public lands.

“And we can expect that they’re going to keep throwing stuff up at it,” Carroll said.

Steve Bloch, legal director at Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said he worries it’s an effort to get Americans accustomed to selling off public lands to pay for tax cuts.

“Once you start down that path,” he said, “it’s a pretty slippery slope.”

Utah’s latest legal strategies

Despite the recent failures, Utah continues to explore multiple avenues as it looks to assert control over federal lands within its borders.

A June report from the Utah Legislature’s Federalism Commission authored by the Davillier Law Group and JW Howard Attorneys concluded that “state sovereignty and jurisdiction extends to all land within the borders of the several states, unless federal legislation … place[s] state law in conflict with federal authority on federally controlled lands.”

In other words, the report argues that Utah law applies to lands within its boundaries, even those owned by the federal government.

The state of Utah has worked with the Louisiana-based Davillier Law Group before. State leaders in 2016 budgeted $3 million for the firm to draft a complaint arguing that Utah should control public land. San Juan County also paid the firm almost $500,000 the same year to lobby against the designation of Bears Ears National Monument.

The Federalism Commission report’s findings drew sharp criticism from John Ruple and Jamie Pleune, both professors at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.

In a blog post published Tuesday, the professors wrote that, contrary to the report’s conclusions, the “federal authority over public lands in Utah sits on firm, well-established, and long-recognized principles of constitutional law.”

“The legal analysis in the document takes legal principles out of context, omits important historical and legal principles, and exaggerates the degree to which federal authority over public lands in the west is contested,” they wrote. “It should be read with skepticism.”

Meanwhile, the status of the state’s highly promoted lawsuit against the federal government remains unknown.

Although the Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s lawsuit attempting to force the BLM to give up wide swaths of land in Utah, state leaders have said they weren’t deterred.

Months after that decision, though, it’s unclear if the state intends to take it to district court. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is suing Utah in an attempt to block the state from refiling.

During a hearing in that case on Monday, an attorney for the state said “it’s under consideration, but it’s not guaranteed that [the state’s lawsuit] will even be filed again. As we stand here today, there is no federal lawsuit, and there may never be one.”

An uphill road ahead

Public pushback following Lee’s proposal has many states, and even some federal policymakers, pulling back. Burgum declined to offer full-throated support for Lee’s plan last month, even though it nearly mirrors his proposal with HUD.

Some states that once were staunch conservative allies in the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s, like Arizona and Nevada, have since turned purple. And even solidly red Western states like Idaho and Montana strongly opposed Lee’s plan.

Yet, Utah remains undeterred.

Johnson and other state leaders assert that if and when Utah does gain control of federal lands, they will remain open to the public. The state will provide better management than a federal government that swings between Republican and Democratic administrations every four to eight years, he said, and will better balance the needs of recreation and rural economies.

Since the 1970s, Johnson said, a significant chunk of Utah’s federal lands have been prohibited from certain economic uses due to the protections that came with roadless rules, national conservation areas and national monument designations.

“Losing all those high-paying jobs in the timber industry and then the mining industry and even renewable industries,” he said, “has created some hardship on some of our rural counties.”

But environmental historian Sara Dant said past precedent has shown economic interests tend to override environmental protection and public access without federal protections. It led to past problems like overgrazing, overlogging, endangered species and polluted streams.

“Our historical experience tells us what happens when we throw open the lands of the United States to capitalist exploitation,” Dant said. “That’s how we got public lands in the first place.”

Even on public lands Utah does manage, lawmakers have shown willingness to defer to developers. They considered privatizing Utah Lake’s lakebed so a developer could to turn it into island real estate, but the state’s attorney general quashed those plans after determining the state was supposed to manage it for the public trust.

And while the case Utah has made for seizing federal land most recently targets smaller tracts in an effort to address the West’s break-neck growth, Dant noted those areas near population centers are often the public lands Utahns hold most dear.

“They’re the kinds of public lands that lower-income families can access when they can’t afford to go stay in Zion National Park,” Dant said. “They can access the public lands that are within a mile or two of their house. That’s invaluable, and you can’t put a price tag on that.”

Correction 10:06 a.m. July 23, 2025 • This story has been updated to clarify actions Utah lawmakers took involving Utah Lake.