The GOP Has Found A New Reason To Pawn Off America’s Public Lands

Anti-federal land zealots across the country must be licking their chops.

The new Republican Party platform, adopted this week in advance of the next week’s nominating convention in Milwaukee, mentions federal lands only once — and rather than a vague call to protect them, it proposes pawning some of them off to address housing affordability.

Republicans will “open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction” in order to “help new home buyers,” the platform states. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed the 16-page document.

In its first term, the Trump administration repeatedly cast itself as an opponent of federal land disposal, only to cozy up to leaders of the pro-land transfer movement and, on several occasions, propose public land sell-offs .

“We’re not looking to sell off land,” Trump said in a 2016 interview . At the time, the GOP platform explicitly called for transferring control of federal lands to states.

Now eyeing a second term in the White House, Trump has endorsed a new party platform that tries to make selling off federal land — an idea that is wildly unpopular among Western voters — more digestible by tying it to America’s housing crunch.

One big champion of the proposal is William Perry Pendley, a longtime proponent of federal land transfer and sale who served illegally as Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management for more than a year.

In late June, Pendley published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled, “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land,” in which he grumbled about the size of the federal estate and argued Westerners “find their way to a better future impeded unnecessarily by vast swaths of federal land largely unused,