This Land Is Your Land

Should the federal government auction less than one percent of non-conservation status public lands to alleviate housing shortages and reduce federal debt? This is how Utah Senator Mike Lee tried to frame the question when he included a provision to this effect in the Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill. Alas for Senator Lee, the New Right’s resounding answer has been hell no, and he has beaten a hasty retreat. Perhaps to his relief, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled the public land sale provision ineligible for the reconciliation procedure under which the BBB was being handled. Mr. Lee lives to fight another day, but can the New Right be warmed up to his proposal?

For many years, Western Republicans have chafed at the federal government’s poor management of public lands, which make up most of the acreage of several states. California is almost half public land, while Nevada is more than 80%. Western states average about 50% public lands.

These lands were open to homesteading until 50 years ago, just as was the vast American valley of the Mississippi. But where the Great Plains were rapidly settled with farms and towns, the arid Mountain West saw far less settlement. Late 19th-century technology was inadequate to access the water resources necessary to farm most of the high desert, so homesteaders stuck to the very few fertile stream valleys. The rest of the land remained free for mining and cattle grazing.

Some of it was eventually settled in the first half of the 20th century thanks to large irrigation projects, and vast areas were classified as national forests, preserving them for timber production. Dozens of national parks were added to the mix at the dawn of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and federal legislation ended homesteading in 1976. The frontier, long practically closed by technological and cultural limits, was now formally and legally closed as well.

The conservation and recreation values of these millions of acres of public land are high, and for many millions of Americans (and a notably strong cohort in the New Right) the opportunity to hike, backpack, camp, fish, hunt, and just be more human is an essential element of our American heritage.

Much public land is in various types of “conservation status”: wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and the like. But many millions of acres are “generic” and managed (or mismanaged) by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service for mining, grazing, and timber production. It is a mistake to think of every acre of public land as pristine wilderness fit only for permanent preservation and enjoyment in its natural state. But it is also a profound error to think of public lands with spreadsheet-brain proneness to maximize measurable financial value.

These are the teeth of the trap into which Senator Lee stepped.

Reopening the Frontier

What policy problem was Lee’s bill meant to solve? Not fire danger, not reduction in productive resource development, not revitalization of struggling rural towns—all of which haunt the West after decades of federal ineptitude. No, it was introduced to help pay down the national debt and solve the conundrum of housing affordability, which congressional allies then restated as affordable housing, which most people know is not even the same thing.

Lee wanted to sell areas of public land suitable for housing development near cities, with priority given to isolated tracts with existing infrastructure services, and excluding pretty much everything in conservation status. Many New Right critics argued that nothing in the bill prevented the sale of non-conservation lands that nonetheless have high recreational value and use. But I don’t think that was the biggest problem with the bill.

In my view, it was that the legislation would not help solve the problem Lee wanted to address. Outrageous housing costs are caused by local land use practices, not federal land ownership near cities. If Senator Lee’s bill was passed and signed by President Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum could designate a perfect area of land in Solano County, California (let’s stipulate that nobody would object to this specific sale), and sell it to Silicon Valley billionaires trying to show the world they can build a new city in California. The tech bro town fathers would still be completely helpless when they apply to the Solano County Planning Commission for permits to build California Forever. Some new housing, maybe someday—but not so affordable.

Any undeveloped land the federal government transfers into private hands would then be fully regulated by state and local governments, under whatever rules those zoning overlords impose. And the only players likely to prosper in such environments are large-scale developers with substantial capital who currently operate those systems effectively.

There is another feasibility problem with Lee’s bill. Who would anyone trust within the federal land bureaucracy to carry out such a program effectively, and would other federal laws allow it to move forward? Lee’s bill had no exemptions from federal environmental review or the Endangered Species Act. The discretionary selection of lands to be sold under his bill would languish through years of planning, interagency consultation, and environmental review, followed by more years of litigation extending so far into the future that we would be dealing with Elon Musk’s breakaway Republic of Mars long before anyone sells your favorite MAGA influencer’s favorite hiking trail to BlackRock.

So should Senator Lee avoid introducing another public lands bill in the future? No.

Many critics of Lee’s bill conceded that some disposal of public lands could be in the public interest. The real questions are: Which ones, what for, and how to ensure that the purpose is achieved?

The state of water technology closed the frontier to new settlement decades before Congress repealed the Homestead Act in 1976. But the technological frontier has remained open, and lack of water is not the same barrier it was a century ago for at least some settlement of the arid West. Conservation, building, well technology, and the increased feasibility of non-agricultural settlement make it possible to found new communities in areas that once lacked adequate water resources.

What was impossible in 1925 is possible today: the reopening of the Western frontier to new settlement.

A generation of Americans yearning to build something good in their own country should be allowed the opportunity to try what their grandparents succeeded wildly at. The Western half of the United States should be open to technologically feasible settlement in the same way the Eastern half was. New towns that could grow into new cities would foster the Golden Age that everyone is tweeting about—which need to be built in real time. Just doing things is better than endless planning, consulting, assessing, and other forms of bureaucratic morass that engulf everything it touches.

Just Doing Things

Senator Lee should introduce a different bill: the New Frontier Homestead Act of 2026.

The first task is defenestrating state and local land use veto holders from the conversation. If reopening the frontier to technologically feasible settlement on public lands is a congressional objective, then the county planning commission is just going to have to pound sand. The tech bros aren’t going to build California City if the Solano County planning Karens have anything to say about it. The New Frontier will have to be opened under federal protection.

The second task is like the first: preventing federal laws and bureaucracy from killing it. To be exempt from state law, the land will have to remain in federal ownership or control while development occurs. But for any desirable development to occur under federal protection, several elements of federal law will have to be explicitly waived as well. This list of federal anti-development statutes can be copied and pasted from the congressional authorization to build the border wall. Presto—no environmental review, no decades-long interagency consultation over habitat for gnatcatchers. Instead, this is about “just doing things.”

With those obstacles surmounted, how would the Act work?

The current Interior Department and Forest Service (perhaps a DOGE-type team within each) should propose a list of non-conservation lands to be opened (the percentage of non-conservation public land in the original Lee bill, which was between .5 and .75%, is probably about right). Congress could then put that list in legislation. Or it could distill the list into a clear set of criteria for parcels. Proposing a list before the legislation is enacted would demonstrate the competence of the GOP and the Trump Administration, and help build the cultural and policy case for the New Frontier Homestead Act.

If the NFHA is wildly successful, more might be done in a future round. If it flops, relatively little harm will have been done. In any event, the conservation ethic will remain strong and serve as a natural check on the disposal of large amounts of public land, as will the usefulness of much of it, particularly for mining strategic metals and rare earths. Once the lands are determined, they should be catalogued into 40-acre parcels for disposal, just as with the original Homestead Act.

Only adult, natural-born citizens would be eligible for a New Frontier homestead. No shell companies, no layers of corporate bureaucracy concealing pension funds, insurance companies, multinationals, or sovereign wealth funds. These would be the only qualifications for eligibility.

Requiring individuals to take responsibility at the front end helps vet applicants and limits them to only one entry. The Lee bill allowed any type of entity to win two parcels per auction cycle. But the Tocquevillian spirit of the original Homestead Act, focused on small holdings and personal development, is needed to open the New Frontier.

The original Homestead Act allowed anyone to stake a claim and then build a home and farm the claimed land over five years. If a threshold percentage of the homestead was farmed over those five years, the Land Office transferred ownership to the homesteader. Farming was the necessary foundation for a new community in the 19th century.

This is clearly not true today, with new technology and new economics. One should still be allowed to establish title through farming part or all of the land. But other ways of improving land should be counted, including starting businesses that employ a given number of people who live on the 40 acres, building homes with related amenities (like a church, school, clinic, or community store) and similar measures of development.

For simplicity and to minimize the amount of judgment and discretion exercised by federal bureaucrats charged with approving the final patents, the qualification for obtaining the land grant should be very clear and enforceable. This will lead to some oversimplification and perhaps gaming the requirements, but the alternative is endless fights over whether a homesteader has done enough to earn the patent. We want this to succeed wildly, not be a federal program to install rural broadband.

If the homesteader doesn’t develop the homestead adequately, he loses his investment, and it goes back to the pool for reallocation. Great rewards require great risks and are not for the faint of heart. Tolerating risk of loss is a necessary filter for the pioneers we want on the New Frontier.

The Lee bill awarded parcels to winners at auction. The biggest war chest would win twice in every auction cycle. Instead, the way to choose the pioneers without advantaging the oligarchs is by lottery. Anyone with a dream can get land, not just the wealthiest auction bidders, and if anyone can win, more people with good ideas or energy will try it.

Various lottery methods can be used. Entrants could be aggregated nationwide, with the entire pool chosen from for each parcel. Or entrants could designate one or a small number of parcels to be considered, and then the lottery for each parcel could be among those most interested in it. Though once your number is pulled, you are then ineligible for another parcel in the lottery.

What will the winning pioneers pay? Processing costs. If we want the New Frontier settled by young builders with vision, energy, and optimism, we can’t give them the student loan treatment. Yes, they will get an enormous benefit for very little land cost if they succeed, and no, this won’t help pay off the $37 trillion national debt. But today nearly everyone in the Western portion of the Mississippi Valley lives on land that was once given by the federal government to a homesteader. We all idolize the pioneer spirit of those homesteaders, our great-grandparents who made something out of nothing and built a nation. We don’t resent the fact they were given 40 acres of Mississippi Valley farmland for $10 as part of a strategic policy to settle a nation.

So there we are: the New Frontier Homestead Act. Natural-born citizens are eligible to enter a lottery to be awarded 40 acres of public land. If they develop to specific benchmarks within five years, free of both state and federal regulation, the federal government grants them title upon payment of processing costs.

Do you want to renew America? This is a pretty good start.