Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is defending his proposal to include the potential sale or transfer of some public lands in the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill currently being negotiated in the U.S. Senate.

Lee is the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and has been on record for some time as a supporter of making public land under federal stewardship available for housing projects.

According to an updated draft released by Lee’s committee, the Senator’s proposal would instruct the secretaries of Agriculture and Interior to “select for disposal” between 0.5 and 0.75 percent of land currently held by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management across 11 eligible states.

Lee’s proposal has generated outraged among certain environmentalist groups, including the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) which claims that selling public lands “threatens public access, undermines responsible land management, puts environmental values, cultural resources, and endangered species at risk along with clean drinking water for 60 million Americans and betrays the public’s trust.”

Lee pushed back against those claims last week on Glenn Beck’s program, saying, “The federal government owns 640 million acres of land, nearly a third of all land in the United States. The vast majority of that land has zero recreational value. Disposing of a fraction of 1 percent of that, so that the next generation can afford a home, is a common-sense solution to a national problem.”

The federal government currently owns more than 640 million acres of land, most of which is located west of the Mississippi river.

Lee points out that roughly 67% of the land in his home state of Utah is owned by the federal government and asks where the harm is in reducing that amount by “a fraction of a percent.”

The Senate will likely be considering Lee’s proposal this week as members of Congress continue to try to move the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill forward.