On the recordJune 25, 2015
This amendment is really relatively simple. It takes $1 million from the Bureau of Land Management's management of lands account and inserts it right back into the account with the intent of identifying unused land for potential sale to Americans. The service charges, deposits, and forfeitures account already has the authority to dispose of land under the Bureau of Land Management, but is not specifically appropriated funds. Today, Mr. Chairman, the United States Government owns and controls 640 million acres of American land. This is 27 percent of the entire landmass in the United States. If you take all of the countries in Western Europe, the United States Government, Uncle Sam, owns that much land and more. In this poster to my left, the red portions of the poster identify land that is owned by Uncle Sam, the Federal Government. The white portions, of course, are land that is owned by private entities. Included in the red area is Alaska. The red area represents 27 percent of the landmass in the United States. A lot of this land is unused, and it is not even managed by the Federal Government. It is just sitting in these different parts of the country. This amendment is very simple. It tells the Bureau of Land Management to study the possibility of selling some of this land back to Americans. Let Americans own America, not all of it. We are not talking about the national parks, the national forests. We are not talking about Yosemite.…
