OPINION: Don't buy the administration's plans for public lands

Since Jan. 20, the Trump administration has announced a plethora of ideas for America’s public lands, like boosting energy production, increasing logging and mining, even building data centers. Administration officials recently unveiled a new plan: building housing on public lands. However, like most of President Donald Trump’s plans, it involves a lot of smoke and mirrors and handouts to the wealthy, and leaves average Americans holding the bag.

It’s no secret that the United States is facing a housing shortage. A recent survey found that 76% of Americans believe the affordability of housing is a serious problem. In response to this crisis, the White House debuted the concepts of a plan to build “affordable” housing. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced a joint agency task force to explore building “affordable” homes on federal lands in the West. The plan is light on details, but they claim it will kick off a housing boom for communities in need. Unfortunately for the thousands of American families looking for housing, Trump’s plan isn’t really about affordable housing.

In reality, Trump and his allies seem more focused on privatizing public lands across the West. The acting director of the Bureau of Land Management suggested his agency could privatize 400,000 acres of certain public lands as initial targets for Trump’s plan. Meanwhile, the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce are promoting their own proposal, which calls for selling public lands to private developers. Notably, it includes no requirement that housing built on those now-privatized lands be affordable.

Meanwhile, other administration actions are undercutting the federal government’s ability to do anything about this crisis. Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency want to slash the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 8,300-person staff by nearly half. DOGE has fired as many as 2,300 staff at the Department of the Interior, including nearly 10% of BLM staff. Chaotically firing thousands of the employees who would be tasked with implementing any ultimate plan makes it difficult to imagine how it would be implemented successfully.

And hovering in the background are the concrete actions the Trump administration has already taken regarding public lands. On day one, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders seeking to eliminate protections from public lands to boost oil and gas production. He has ordered land managers to prioritize mining on public lands, opened up more than half of our national forests to corporate logging, and announced intentions to reduce or eliminate national monuments. A track record like that suggests the administration is serious about one thing — boosting private development on public lands.

One final development is ominous for the future of public control over our public lands. As the congressional debate over the federal budget kicked off last month, multiple Trump-aligned members of Congress suggested selling public lands to cover Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for billionaires. Secretary Burgum has previously suggested public lands are assets on national balance sheets, the Senate rejected an opportunity to block a possible sale, and last week, House Republicans waited until the dead of night to slip in a provision to the Trump budget package that could result in sell-offs of public landscapes across Nevada and Utah. A mass privatization of public lands isn’t just on the table, it’s a key part of their plan.

Time will tell whether the Trump administration is serious about tackling the housing crisis. Their track record does not instill confidence. Until proven otherwise, the American people should be wary of accepting this sales pitch as a solution.

Editor's note:This article originally published with a headshot that wasn't the author.