Power & Market

The Overreaction on Trump's Proposed Change to Federal Lands

The Overreaction on Trump's Proposed Change to Federal Lands

The Trump administration recently announced it was considering a partial reversal of the Obama administration's designation of new national monument lands in Utah. The lands in question were already federal lands, but Obama's move heightened restrictions on the usage of the land, and lessened the likelihood the lands would ever be transferred to state control. 

Trump's announcement brought overreactions from many, some of whom implied that the Trump administration was somehow privatizing the land. This is not at all the case, and there's little reason to believe that the federal lands in questions will stop being federal lands any time soon. See: "Trump's Action on Federal Lands is Not Privatization."

The Blaze called me for some additional comments: 

“There seems to be an overreaction, from both sides, in looking at this as a major change,” [McMaken] said.

From the start, McMaken was irked by the misconception that the issue was being framed as a situation in which public lands were being privatized. Mainstream media organizations “acted as if this was a situation in which public lands were going to be sold off into private hands, and that’s not the case,” McMaken said...

“There’s an assumption among many Americans people in Eastern states that it’s either federal land or it’s private land,” McMaken said. “But when you look at a lot of these Western states, they have lots of state parks and if you poll the local population, what you’re gonna find out is that people love their public land.”

McMaken added: “It’s not a situation where land is being de-federalized. It was federal land, and it’s going to continue being federal land.

“There is a common misconception that federal lands are the only type of public lands,” McMaken said. “This, of course, is not the case. Even if the Trump administration were to turn some federal lands into state lands, the state legislatures in those states would then face enormous pressure from voters to keep those lands as public lands for the use of residents. It is by no means a safe assumption that any lands that cease to be federal lands will become privatized.”

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