Anti-federal land zealots throughout the nation have to be licking their chops.
The brand new Republican Social gathering platform, adopted this week upfront of the subsequent week’s nominating conference in Milwaukee, mentions federal lands solely as soon as — and quite than a obscure name to guard them, it proposes pawning a few of them off to handle housing affordability.
Republicans will “open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction” in an effort to “help new home buyers,” the platform states. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed the 16-page doc.
In its first time period, the Trump administration repeatedly forged itself as an opponent of federal land disposal, solely to cozy as much as leaders of the pro-land switch motion and, on a number of events, suggest public land sell-offs.
“We’re not looking to sell off land,” Trump stated in a 2016 interview. On the time, the GOP platform explicitly known as for transferring management of federal lands to states.
Now eyeing a second time period within the White Home, Trump has endorsed a brand new get together platform that tries to make promoting off federal land — an thought that’s wildly unpopular amongst Western voters — extra digestible by tying it to America’s housing crunch.
One massive champion of the proposal is William Perry Pendley, a longtime proponent of federal land switch and sale who served illegally as Trump’s appearing director of the Bureau of Land Administration for greater than a 12 months.
In late June, Pendley printed an op-ed within the Washington Examiner titled, “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land,” by which he grumbled in regards to the dimension of the federal property and argued Westerners “find their way to a better future impeded unnecessarily by vast swaths of federal land largely unused, unnecessary, and exorbitantly expensive to maintain.”
The GOP should have been listening, though the platform proposal notably makes use of the phrase “open” quite than “sell” federal land.
The trouble seems to be a part of a broader shift inside the Republican Social gathering. As HuffPost beforehand reported, GOP lawmakers have largely deserted brazen requires the outright sale and switch of federal lands, as a substitute working to intestine environmental protections and discover savvier methods to provide states extra of a say in how public lands are managed.
“They realized a wholesale sell-off was a political third rail, so now they’re trying to frame it as a housing solution, but what they’re actually proposing is just more sprawl and McMansions,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director on the Colorado-based conservation group Heart for Western Priorities, advised HuffPost.
The Heart for Western Priorities printed a prolonged piece in June detailing why rising calls to open public lands for housing growth would do little, if something, to handle the problem of residence affordability.
Previous to becoming a member of the Trump administration, Pendley was all in on promoting off federal lands, writing in a 2016 op-ed that the “Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.” As soon as he was on the helm of the BLM, Pendley argued that his previous opinions and positions on federal land had been “irrelevant” to the job of overseeing 245 million acres.
Now again on the skin of presidency, maybe eyeing a publish in a future Trump administration, Pendley is again to his outdated methods.
Alongside along with his latest op-ed, which thinly disguises his anti-federal land extremism as a easy answer to the housing disaster, Pendley authored the Inside Division chapter of Venture 2025, a sweeping coverage blueprint that the Heritage Basis and dozens of different right-wing organizations compiled to information Trump and his group ought to he win in November.
Pendley’s contribution is little greater than an oil and fuel trade wishlist for the greater than 500 million acres of federal land that the Inside Division manages, as HuffPost beforehand reported. In truth, when it got here to the chapter’s part on power, Pendley handed the pen over to the top of an oil/fuel commerce and lobbying group and two different fossil gasoline trade allies.
Trump has absurdly tried to say he is aware of “nothing about Project 2025.”
“I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and, unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” he not too long ago wrote on Reality Social. “The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said.”
In actuality, no less than 140 individuals who labored within the Trump administration performed a job in creating Venture 2025, in response to a latest CNN evaluation.
In relation to public lands insurance policies, Pendley’s fingerprints look like on each paperwork. And whereas the brand new GOP platform goes additional than Venture 2025 in that it explicitly requires “limited” federal lands to be “opened” — a code phrase for “sold” — for housing growth, the 2 paperwork carefully mirror each other on power growth, every outlining a fossil-fuel-centric agenda to revive so-called “energy dominance.”
