The Trump administration is officially pushing to sell off federal lands to states and tribes to reduce the size of the government’s real estate footprint, breaking with 50 years of precedent that largely limited land sales.

The Interior Department said it will “work to decrease the size of the federal estate” in a new strategic plan that states plainly for the first time a Trump administration policy endorsing federal lands sales.

The document lays out the administration’s intent to sell federal lands to states, tribes and local governments, and then give the local and state governments a portion of the proceeds for conservation work elsewhere.

The strategic plan also declared that Interior will no longer use the Land and Water Conservation Fund to expand the federal government’s real estate footprint. The congressionally mandated fund receives $900 million annually, a portion of which is required to be used for land acquisition, but Interior said in the plan that it will instead use the money to increase access on privately owned lands.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has referred to the country’s 640 million acres of federal lands as a “balance sheet” and pushed for increased development on that land. Public lands advocates and conservationists have feared that the Trump administration would ultimately try to decrease the federal government’s holdings altogether.

The new strategic plan confirms those fears. Tracy Stone-Manning, who served as director of the Bureau of Land Management during the Biden administration and now leads the Wilderness Society, called the new policy “an unprecedented step that defies history.”

The first Trump administration’s strategic plan for the Interior Department made no mention of land sales, swaps or disposal.

“This so-called strategic plan is straight out of Secretary Burgum’s vulture capitalist playbook. He looks at our public lands and sees a balance sheet — nothing more than tradeable assets and potential profits,” said California Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.

The Interior Department did not respond to request for comment.

A subset of Republicans and development advocates have long disagreed with that perspective. They view the past 50 years of restrictions on land sales as a serious break with the preceding century of development on public lands that shaped the American West.

“It’s encouraging that they’re proposing trying to sell this land,” said Arthur Gailes, an economist and housing researcher at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are correct in their basic assessment that the federal government could scale back its land holdings a tremendous amount and generate revenue for the federal government.”

Gailes was instrumental to an AEI proposal to sell federal land to address housing shortages in communities adjacent to unused tracts of government real estate. The Trump administration embraced that idea — which suggested that 1.5 million homes could be built over 10 years on federal land with otherwise limited purpose — and launched a task force in early 2025 to identify land ripe for disposal and housing development. The conclusions of that task force were never publicized.

There was widespread bipartisan public backlash against that proposal, as well as against a land sales effort led by Utah and Nevada Republicans during the 2025 reconciliation bill debate. That response temporarily quelled aggressive public pushes for land disposals from Burgum.

“Two summers ago, I led the successful fight to stop an unprecedented proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands, and I will do it again,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), who is poised to take control of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee next Congress.

Heinrich was heavily involved in preventing the land sales effort from appearing in the final 2025 reconciliation bill, alongside several Montana Republicans. “These lands belong to the American people, not private interests looking to cash in,” he said.

Still, Interior has continued to pursue new land uses, swaps and disposals, as The Washington Sun previously reported. The ideas have ranged from proposals to build data centers on federal landsto an effort to enable a land swap for a private developer in Yosemite National Park.

“Through these sales, the Department will be able to focus its resources on primary federal responsibilities and nationally significant federal lands,” the agency wrote in its new strategic plan.

It’s not clear how far the administration can go in offloading public lands. Congress passed a law in the 1970s that largely restricted federal land sales, and the federal government has since offered limited sales and land swaps in cases where the public benefit or conservation benefit were exceptionally clear.

The Bureau of Land Management — which oversees about 40% of all federal lands — has the greatest freedom to pursue land sales compared to the other arms of the federal government, but even that power is quite limited.

“This new strategic plan from DOI conflicts with long-standing congressional intent that we retain public lands in public hands for the benefit of the American people,” said Chris Winter, a public lands advocate and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, law school.

Burgum published the strategic plan the same day that he announced that the agency’s vision would shift from “manage our land, water, and resources for the benefit of all Americans, today and tomorrow” to “manage resources, improve lives, and create opportunities.”

In the past month, Interior has also announced plans to expand grazing opportunities across federal lands and wildlife refuges, proposed to dramatically change BLM’s land-use planning process, continued to pursue plans to reorganize the department’s bureaus and suggested that it will further downsize its staff.

Huffman, who is poised to take over the House Natural Resources Committee in the next Congress, has indicated that the incoming Democratic majority will be looking into Burgum’s actions around public lands.

“Americans love their public lands and sent a clear message last week: The Trump administration’s schemes to auction off our treasured resources and silence opposition must stop now,” Huffman said. “Democrats in Congress are going to deliver.”

This story originally appeared in The Washington Sun.