Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee withdrew his controversial federal land sale provision from the “big beautiful” tax bill after public pressure from citizens and lawmakers, he said in a Saturday tweet.
“Because of the strict constraints of the budget reconciliation process, I was unable to secure clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families-not to China, not to BlackRock, and not to any foreign interests,” Lee wrote in the tweet.
“For that reason, I’ve made the decision to withdraw the federal land sales provision from the bill,” he wrote.
Lee’s proposed amendment would have instructed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Services (FS) to identify and sell between 0.5 and 0.75 percent of the public lands they hold exclusively for housing purposes.
It had also drawn public criticism from lawmakers in some of these states, including GOP Senators from Idaho and Montana.
Despite Lee’s proposal exempting Montana from the land sale provision, the state’s Republican Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy threatened to introduce their own amendment to strip the bill of Lee’s proposal.
