Conservative Wyoming couldn’t stomach Republican public land sale

Although Donald Trump won Wyoming by a wider margin than any other state in the 2024 presidential election, Equality State residents broke sharply from his party as Republicans sought to sell off 2-3 million acres of public land in the West.

Across a state that often supports and promotes conservative initiatives, there was scant support in recent weeks for the sell-off provision in the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill. The Equality State opposed this GOP budget initiative with criticism from many angles.

That opposition came despite Utah Sen. Mike Lee repeatedly revising his “mandatory disposal” plan. The Republican chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that advanced the measure.

From a one-man logging operation in Cora to a high-grade compass and optics company in Riverton, individuals, businesses, advocacy groups and nonprofits knitted together a coalition that helped kill the sales.

“Not for sale!” hundreds of protesters yelled at the steps of the Capitol in Cheyenne a week ago.

“It’s one of the first times I’ve seen businesses and individuals come across party lines and unite,” said Addi Jenkins, executive director of the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Business Alliance, a group that rallied against the sell-off. “It’s moving to see something still connects us all.”

Land mine

Lee proffered the plan as a solution to unaffordable housing — an issue many communities in the West are grappling with. Critics said it funded a tax break for the wealthy. Importantly, the sell-off would establish the practice of auctioning away unique assets belonging to all Americans, detractors said.

The Beehive State lawmaker, in the face of mounting resistance, reshaped his plan to squeeze through public roadblocks. Protected lands like national parks wouldn’t be touched, he said. He withdrew national forests from the list of eligible sale lands. He trimmed the plan to exclude all but Bureau of Land Management property within five miles of population centers.

But the idea still wouldn’t fly. “I think he stepped on a land mine,” said Buzz Hettick, co-chair of the Wyoming chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Lee surrendered. His Appomattox Courthouse was X.

“I’ve made the decision to withdraw the federal land sales provision from the bill,” he posted Saturday evening on the social media platform.

Opposition came from across the West. The land sale provision was “one of the only big-ticket issues everybody agrees with,” said Jess Moore, a musher who grew up surrounded by the Gros Ventre Mountains. She runs sled dogs there and along the Greys River, making a living on property belonging to all Americans.

Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of disparate organizations from the American Alpine Club to the Surfrider Foundation, said it generated more than half a million letters to lawmakers. “This victory is because of your voices,” Adam Cramer, the group’s CEO, said in a statement.

It’s clear, the group said, that senators “were responding to pressure from their constituents.”

Tribes were active. “Indian Country and our allies were paying attention, and we came together to shut it down,” said Judith LeBlanc, executive director of Native Organizers Alliance Action Fund. The group gathered and sent 23,574 letters to the Senate asking that lawmakers reject the legislation, she said in a statement.

Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Center for Biological Diversity assembled 148 high-profile regional conservation groups who characterized Lee’s effort as deeply unpopular and reckless.

Hettick, flying back to Wyoming after a fishing trip to Alaska, sat next to two people who brought up Lee’s measure and criticized it. “To me, that says a lot,” he said, “that two random people on an airplane would say the same thing.”

Businesses on board

Jenkins’ Wyoming outdoor business group, the Keep It Public coalition and others collected signatures from 115 businesses who called on Republican Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming to oppose Lee’s measure.

“I think this is a great example of issues that fire up and unite people,” said Taylor Phillips, owner of Jackson Hole EcoTour Adventures, who signed the letter.

Threats to public land get “people off the couch and they’re willing to stand up and speak out,” said EcoTour guide Mark Gocke, who moved to Wyoming decades ago for the unencumbered outdoor access. “It’s not partisan,” he said of the sentiment.

In Sublette County, a crossroads of energy development and wild lands where Trump received 79% of the 2024 vote, elected officials stood against Lee’s plan.

“The bill removes the requirements for ‘public involvement’ [and] ‘protection of areas of critical environmental concern,’ among others,” county commissioners and seven other elected officials wrote Barrasso in June. Provisions already exist for the sale of such lands, they said, whereas Lee’s measure “effectively eliminates any shred of input from local citizens.”

Sublette’s county seat, Pinedale, is a community that uses neighboring public lands and “is very vocal” when somebody wants to develop them, resident Karla Bird said. She urged the commissioners to get involved.

“Even [commissioners] didn’t know this fast-paced land sale was in the bill,” Bird said. “It wasn’t just this year’s proposal. What was going to be happening next year and the year after that — sales every 60 days?”

Bird had only asked commissioners to engage with Gov. Mark Gordon over what lands might be sold. It was “a bonus,” she said, when the elected officials wrote a letter opposing the measure outright.

Another Sublette resident — logger and sawmill operator Mark Domek of Cora, who signed the letter to Wyoming’s senators from businesses — supported his local elected officials.

“I’m glad the commissioners had the backbone,” he said. “It is the wrong way to go,” he said of the proposed sales. “We want our public lands so everyone can use them.”

Hageman blames critics

Wyoming’s U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman was unswayed by the wave of public opposition. The congresswoman said Wyomingites were being duped by Lee’s critics.

“A lot of the talk surrounding [Lee’s] efforts has been misleading or flat out untrue,” the Republican wrote in a statement ahead of his decision to back  down. She suggested voters didn’t understand the issue, blaming activists who are ignorant or “willfully distorting [the bill’s] contents to cynically spread unwarranted fear among citizens.”

Lee’s mandatory disposal provision, “does not authorize the mass sale of federal lands,” Hageman wrote, only “about two to three million acres.”

“It is apparent that those organizations and individuals who oppose Senator Lee’s proposal recognize the vast majority of Americans would support it as being a common-sense and reasonable approach to managing a tiny fraction of BLM and USFS lands,” Hageman stated.

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That theory was tested at a town hall Hageman convened in Greybull last month. “Often throughout her presentation, Hageman was interrupted by shouts of protest,” the Greybull Standard reported.

“This is a pivotal piece of legislation that could change the landscape,” Lovell Mayor Tom Newman said at the town hall, “maybe not in my lifetime, but it could change the landscape of the western United States.”

In Wyoming, 58% of respondents oppose giving state government control over national public lands, let alone selling the property for development, according to a Colorado College survey published earlier this year.

Barrasso said in a statement that he listened to mayors, county commissioners, legislators as well as hunters and fishermen, friends and neighbors. “The people of Wyoming deserve to have their voices heard on such an important matter,” he said.

He didn’t comment on existing law that allows federal agencies to sell land in a studied manner. But, if a Lee-like bill is to be considered again, “it must be thoroughly debated through regular order with committee hearings and with input from all concerned,” Barasso said.

Lummis didn’t respond to a request for comment on the land-sale provision. But on Tuesday, she issued a list of 25 “wins” in the Big Beautiful Bill as passed by the Senate. Preserving public lands was not among them.

For business owners who make a living off public lands, that property is their supply chain, business alliance leader Jenkins said. “The idea of losing access is pretty scary,” she said.

Musher Moore said the land sale issue had been percolating for a while. “This proposal kind of pushed it into the spotlight and made everybody say ‘No, thank you,’” she said.

EcoTour Adventures owner Phillips said Americans recognize the value of the wide-open West and want to keep that as part of their national identity.

“We are incredibly unique in that we have these large tracts of lands that are protected and managed by the federal government,” he said. “Most places around the world can’t say that.”

Wildlife guide Gocke sees that sentiment in his clients after they spot a moose five minutes from town. He talked about wide-eyed children looking through spotting scopes at bighorn rams, bison on the grasslands, perhaps even a bear or wolf.

“People are just floored,” he said. “People are craving it and can’t get enough. I don’t recall any tour that I went on where people were disappointed.” 

Backcountry hunter Hettick said lawmakers are now on notice. “The American public will jump right down your throat if you continue this.”

This article has been corrected to reflect that Keep it Public helped collect signators to the letter to senators and that logger Domek is not a member of the Outdoor Recreation Business Alliance. It was updated to reflect that 115 businesses ultimately signed on — Ed.