Newhouse praises removal of public lands sale from GOP One Big Beautiful Bill
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- WA Rep. Newhouse backed the cut of a public land sales clause from the Senate bill.
- Utah Sen. Lee withdrew the land proposal over safeguard concerns and GOP resistance.
- Congress seeks to finalize Trump’s $4T bill with tax cuts by July 4 deadline.
U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse over the weekend praised the removal of a provision in the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have paved the way to sell off millions of acres of public lands.
“I have fought from the beginning of this process to keep public lands in public hands, and made clear I would vote against a final version that included the provision,” Newhouse’s office wrote Saturday on social media.
“However, we have to improve the management of our federal lands and I will work with this administration to accomplish this objective,” the Sunnyside Republican continued.
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, earlier on Saturday announced that he would rescind the sales provision in the reconciliation package.
Lee originally proposed it as a way to expand affordable housing in rural communities, but he couldn’t ensure “clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families.”
That came after he was required to narrow and refine the proposal’s language after it was reviewed by the Senate parliamentarian, according to Politico.
Then, the weekend updates came when Newhouse and a coalition of four other Western state Republican representatives submitted a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday warning about the sell-off.
The lawmakers wrote that they generally agreed to many of the changes the Senate proposed to the bill, which was passed by the House on May 22. But they “cannot accept the sale of federal lands that Sen. (Mike) Lee seeks.”
“If a provision to sell public lands is in the bill that reaches the House floor, we will be forced to vote no,” they said.
Republicans barely passed the bill a month ago on a 215-214 vote.
Much of the federal land in the Tri-Cities area was far too remote to build on, saw frequent wildland fires or was too steep of terrain — mostly around the Horse Heaven Hills, the Saddle Mountains and the Juniper Dunes areas. But there were some tracts of developable areas.
The lands sale provision would have required the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to cull nearly 3 million in public lands — less than 1% of their holdings — across nearly a dozen western states for sale to build housing.
While Lee’s effort exempted beloved sites such as national parks and monuments, it sparked strict backlash in recent days with conservationists and fellow Republicans.
The One Big Beautiful Bill is President Donald Trump’s marquee legislative package that includes a bulk of his second-term domestic and economic agenda. Congress is trying to pass and reconcile the package before the July 4 holiday weekend.
The proposed tax cuts would increase the deficit by $3.3 trillion and lead to 11.8 million more people without medical insurance by 2034, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
A spokesperson for Newhouse’s office says the congressman plans to review the final text of the bill before determining how he will vote on it.
Newhouse praised the House version passed a month ago, highlighting the reforms to SNAP and Medicaid to cut out “waste, fraud and abuse,” and the tax benefits for proposed small modular nuclear reactors in Tri-Cities.
