Sen. Lee scales down public lands sale, hits a Senate budget snag

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) ‘s controversial public lands sale in the “big beautiful” budget bill hit a snag Monday after the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the sale did not meet a budgetary requirement known as the Byrd rule.

That rule requires that reconciliation bills must be solely budgetary.

But a spokesperson for Lee’s office tells ABC 4 that just before that ruling, Lee submitted new changes, stressing that they were made as a result of a massive amount of feedback to the proposal, not to meet the rule. As of this publishing, the office was still waiting on a ruling from the Parliamentarian on the new changes.

“I’m still listening,” Lee wrote on his official Senate X account. “I’m working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people—not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios. This land must go to American families. Period.”

Sen. Lee announced some of these broad changes on Monday on his personal X account, stressing previously that public land sold would go towards building family housing, something he echoed in the post.

Those changes include eliminating U.S. Forest Service land from the bill, reducing the amount of BLM land, and requiring that those lands be “within 5 miles of a population center.”

Lee’s changes also included so-called “freedom zones” to ensure that the lands “benefit American families,” though it’s unclear what exactly those are. He also said the changes would “protect our farmers, ranchers, and recreational users.”

The original bill required the sale of at least 2 million acres of public lands, making 258 million acres of land across the West and 18.7 million acres in Utah eligible.

If the new changes don’t pass the Byrd rule, it could put the whole public lands sale in jeopardy.

Abigail Jones contributed to this report.