Anti-federal land zealots throughout the nation should be licking their chops.
The brand new Republican Social gathering platform, adopted this week prematurely of the subsequent week’s nominating conference in Milwaukee, mentions federal lands solely as soon as — and reasonably than a imprecise name to guard them, it proposes pawning a few of them off to handle housing affordability.
Republicans will “open restricted parts of Federal Lands to permit for brand new residence development” with the intention to “assist new residence consumers,” the platform states. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed the 16-page doc.
In its first time period, the Trump administration repeatedly solid 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 trying to dump land,” Trump mentioned 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 concept that’s wildly unpopular amongst Western voters — extra digestible by tying it to America’s housing crunch.
One huge champion of the proposal is William Perry Pendley, a longtime proponent of federal land switch and sale who served illegally as Trump’s performing director of the Bureau of Land Administration for greater than a yr.
In late June, Pendley revealed an op-ed within the Washington Examiner titled, “Remedy the housing disaster by promoting authorities land,” by which he grumbled in regards to the dimension of the federal property and argued Westerners “discover their option to a greater future impeded unnecessarily by huge swaths of federal land largely unused, pointless, and exorbitantly costly to keep up.”
The GOP should have been listening, though the platform proposal notably makes use of the phrase “open” reasonably than “promote” 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 present 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 attempting to border it as a housing answer, however what they’re truly proposing is simply extra sprawl and McMansions,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director on the Colorado-based conservation group Middle for Western Priorities, advised HuffPost.
The Middle for Western Priorities revealed a lengthy 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 meant all lands owned by the federal authorities to be bought.” 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 Challenge 2025, a sweeping coverage blueprint that the Heritage Basis and dozens of different right-wing organizations compiled to information Trump and his crew 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. Actually, 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 gas trade allies.
Trump has absurdly tried to assert he is aware of “nothing about Challenge 2025.”
“I’ve not seen it, do not know who’s in control of it, and, in contrast to our very nicely acquired Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it,” he just lately wrote on Reality Social. “The Radical Left Democrats are having a subject day, nonetheless, attempting to hook me into no matter insurance policies are acknowledged or mentioned.”
In actuality, at the very least 140 individuals who labored within the Trump administration performed a task in creating Challenge 2025, in line with a latest CNN review.
On the subject of public lands insurance policies, Pendley’s fingerprints look like on each paperwork. And whereas the brand new GOP platform goes additional than Challenge 2025 in that it explicitly requires “restricted” federal lands to be “opened” — a code phrase for “bought” — for housing growth, the 2 paperwork carefully mirror each other on power growth, every outlining a fossil-fuel-centric agenda to revive so-called “power dominance.”
