Selling Off Your Off-Road Trails Was Never About Affordable Housing. Mike Lee's Latest Vote Proves

Throughout his career, Utah Senator Mike Lee (R) has maintained that his push for selling off our public lands—our off-road trails, our hunting and fishing grounds, our camping, hiking, climbing, and other recreational activities—has always been about helping his and this country's people.

It was about addressing our nation's affordable housing crisis, something that affects millions of young Americans who cannot afford a home of their own. 

He's repeatedly said it, as have his supporters, in the form of both Utah Public Lands Alliance and Blue Ribbon Coalition repeating his talking points. Public land sales for the good of the people! "This is to help American families afford a home," said Lee, posting to his Twitter account last year ahead of the Big Beautiful Bill stand-off, adding a few days later, "Housing prices are crushing families. This land must go to American families."

He's not wrong. The average home in the United States is nearly $500,000. It's almost $550,000 in Lee and my home state. 

But as we've routinely outlined in the past, the push to sell off public lands to help the housing affordability epidemic has always been a bald-faced lie. Lee's own "No" vote on the recently passed H.R.6644, or the "21st Century ROAD to Housing Act," proves just that, as the new Act was specifically designed to help address that problem. The problem? It didn't include land sales. 

Not. One. Acre.

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The Act, according to its text and backers, is designed to help mitigate certain limiting factors that have hindered new home building, financing options for first-time home buyers, adding assistance programs backed by Housing and Urban Development, helping veterans be able to afford homes, as well as removing certain environmental review issues that have made it harder for companies and individuals build new homes. I, personally, have my own issues with it, but the overall Act is one designed to actually help the average American would-be home buyer. 

Moreover, both the Senate and House agree, as the vote in both houses of Congress wasn't even close to split down party lines, being proper bipartisan legislation with the House voting 358-32, and the Senate voting 85-5. Lee, however, was one of the five Senators who voted against it. 

In a statement defending his vote, Senator Lee said, "Americans need more affordable housing. Unfortunately, this bill doesn’t do enough to provide it, instead increasing the federal government’s long-running and failed involvement in the U.S. housing market." Yet, his own track record on attempting to wield the federal government's Department of the Interior and Natural Resources on this very subject says otherwise. And while Lee and I agree (shocking) that it doesn't do enough, the enemy of progress has been, and always will be, the search for perfection. 

A good piece of legislation, even if it's incremental, is still good for some average Americans. But Lee's problem with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act isn't that it's not good enough; it's that it doesn't include his pet project: selling off our public lands. 

From the jump, Lee's personal quest has been to dismantle the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, and Forest Service, and do away with federally managed public lands. And he's worked tirelessly to do just that throughout his career, both in the Senate and here in Utah. That came to a head last summer when Lee threw an amendment into the Big Beautiful Bill moving through Congress that mandated the sale of nearly all of America's public lands. It became a poison pill, though, as outdoorsy and non-outdoorsy Americans alike came together and fought it tooth and nail.

He also helped shepherd a lawsuit sent all the way up to the Supreme Court arguing that Utah should be in charge of Utah's land, not the federal government, spending millions in taxpayer dollars on the lawsuit and a parallel ad campaign he and other public land sell-off proponents put together to sway public opinion.

Public land owners, however, won both. The Supreme Court case got tossed, and Lee's amendment got stripped from the Big Beautiful Bill. Lee, however, hasn't stopped, and has repeatedly used his chair position on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Committee on the Budget to push further land sales, leases, and extraction efforts when the public has overwhelmingly stated that they don't want any of this.

Lee remains undeterred, as his vote proves. 

So, the next time that Senator Lee goes out and talks about how his public land sales push is for affordable housing, remember this vote. Remember that when he had the chance to actually help make housing more affordable for average Americans, he voted no. He voted no because it didn't include selling off your off-road trails and recreation grounds. He voted no because it didn't strip you of the greatest form of undistributed wealth in our nation, to borrow a phrase from my friend Randy Newberg. 

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