The federal government could start selling off thousands of acres of Oregon public lands if provisions added to the Big Beautiful Bill win Congressional approval.

A draft of the legislation was released Wednesday by U.S. Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, who since at least 2022 has repeatedly pushed to sell off public lands for housing development.

Housing is also part of this latest push to sell Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land. In his role as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Lee is calling for the heads of the U.S. Interior and Agriculture departments to dispose of between roughly 2.2 million acres and 3.3 million acres of federal BLM and Forest Service land from 11 states – including Oregon. That is less than one percent of all federal land.

Separately, the legislation calls for the Forest Service to boost logging by 75% over the next decade.

It’s not clear if those logging goals are realistic. The Forest Service has missed its timber targets every year for more than a decade, though it’s possible that tariffs on Canadian lumber could boost demand for logging in the United States, according to industry analysts.

The Senate has a July 4 deadline to vote on the Republican-backed budget reconciliation bill.

Medicaid cuts could slash enrollment in the Oregon Health Plan.

The bill directs the heads of the Forest Service and BLM to consult with Oregon’s governor and tribes about which land to sell. It says those federal leaders should also consider the potential to address local housing needs when determining what land to sell. And 5% of its sale price should go to local governments.

Oregon leaders across the political spectrum agree the state faces a dire housing shortage. The state needs to build close to 30,000 homes per year, mostly in Portland and the Willamette Valley, to address the crisis, according to a recent state report.

It’s not clear that selling federal lands, as Lee proposes, would do much to solve that problem.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in an emailed statement that the public land sell-off would do more to house the wealthy than people hardest hit by housing shortages like “nurses and firemen who will get stuck paying more taxes, more for food, more for utilities.”

“There are no do-overs when it comes to selling off public lands. Once they’re sold, they’re lost forever,” Wyden said. “This proposed Republican yard sale of natural treasures is a non-starter.”

There are no BLM-owned parcels in Oregon, Washington or Idaho large enough to justify housing development, according to an analysis by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit community development research group based in Montana.

The bill mandates the federal government sell more acreage than the Headwaters report says could realistically be developed into housing. That means it would force sales of public land even if they made no sense, Arran Robertson, communication director for environmental group Oregon Wild, said in an email.

The Headwaters report did find Forest Service parcels large enough to support housing development in Oregon – but it found that more than half the federal land near communities with housing shortages is in areas with high wildfire risk.

“Using Bend as a good Oregon example, should we really be building more into the national forest and [wildfire urban interface]?” Robertson said. “There would be recreation and habitat costs, but more importantly, putting more housing directly in a fire-evolved forest is not good policy.”

The bill also encourages agency heads to “reduce checkerboard land patterns” when deciding which land to sell. That could result in the sell-off of what’s known as the “O&C lands” in Western Oregon, 2.4 million acres of forests that are largely managed by the Bureau of Land Management

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/12/latest-federal-budget-bill-would-sell-oregon-public-lands-boost-logging/