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And the first big step that Trump could take in preventing any slippery slide in that direction would be to veto the Land and Water Conservation Fund bill, which enables the federal government to spend billions to purchase millions of acres of private lands for “conservation.”
What? Uncle Sam is going to take out of private hands millions more acres of America’s valuable landmass? This is the reverse of privatization — it is the nationalization of our nation’s farmland, forests, streams and pastures.
I am told by House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Gary Palmer that this land grab was a high priority of the anti-growth environmental groups that oppose further development in the Western states — where most of this land would be seized.
Amazingly, a Republican-controlled Senate approved the federal land grab with little debate, and the House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi snuck the bill through with virtually no debate at all. It’s a good bet almost none of the House or Senate members read this 700-page bill.
According to an analysis by Rep. Garret Graves, R.-La., and an expert on natural resource issues, the bill “permanently authorizes $9 billion per decade for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to acquire new federal and state lands.”
My Heritage Foundation colleague Nick Loris reports that the Department of the Interior already has a $16 billion maintenance backlog on the lands the government already owns but can’t take care of.
This legislation violates a central and common-sense principle of the Republican Party and its fight against the Democrats’ ongoing “War on the West.” That principle dating back to the Newt Gingrich years is simple: Congress shall allow no net loss of private property to the feds
The federal land holdings are already gargantuan, with almost one-third owned by the government and with half of the land in the Western states owned by Uncle Sam. In Nevada and Utah, the government owns almost two-thirds of the land.
President Obama nationalized millions of additional federal lands — and though Republicans whined, they did little to stop him. How depressing it would be if Donald Trump, who has been rightly critical of the Obama land grabs,were to launch a new federal land-purchasing program
