"Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said a federal land sell-off “wasn’t part of the president’s agenda" even though his staff shared research with the Utah senator."
"Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s committee consulted with the Trump administration the day before Lee introduced his wildly unpopular bill to force a sell-off of up to 3.2 million acres of federal public lands across the West, Public Domain has learned.
Internal emails show that President Donald Trump’s Interior Department shared research with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Lee chairs, and helped craft talking points that Lee used to pitch his controversial proposal.
Lee introduced his measure in June as an amendment to Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful” budget bill and pitched it as a common-sense solution to America’s housing crunch. Many treated Lee as a lone actor pushing an extremist public lands privatization agenda, though the Trump administration launched a task force months earlier to study selling off as much as 400,000 acres of federal land for housing development."
