The House of Representative's budget reconciliation bill pulls back more than $250 million from Inflation Reduction Act funding for the National Park Service/Rebecca Latson file

While a massive budget reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House of Represenstatives no longer contains a provision to allow for federal lands to be sold, critics say it contains provisions damaging to the National Park Service, wildlife, and the environment in general.

The measure headed to the Senate for consideration pulls back $267 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding for the Park Service, allows for mining near the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness in Minnesota, and calls for the National Environmental Policy Act to be relaxed under certain circumstances, according to critics. 

Dropped from the bill was an amendment sponsored by GOP Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celese Maloy of Utah that would have allowed for public lands sales in four Nevada counties and one in Utah — including lands near Zion National Park. The Republican majority on the House Natural Resources Committee added the amendment to its outline for funding the Interior Department without engaging Democrats in debate. 

“Thousands of park advocates stood up on behalf of national parks knowing the risk it would pose if Congress opened the door to selling public lands. They made the message clear as day: Our public lands are not for sale. And while that was struck from the bill, we cannot ignore the continued attacks on the National Park Service," Daniel Hart, the National Parks Conservation Association's director of clean energy and climate policy, said Thursday.

“The failure to follow through on previously committed funding is an unbelievably ill-timed blow to a struggling National Park Service. As we speak, hundreds of millions of visitors are making their way to America’s national parks and nearby communities. And rather than provide support for our overwhelmed park staff, Congress is pushing a bill that will only make matters worse for Americans who not only love their public lands, but pay taxpayer dollars to ensure their protection and care," added Hart. "This reconciliation bill will undoubtedly destabilize park operations and cause damage to the nation’s most valuable natural and cultural resources."

At The Wilderness Society (TWS), officials said the bill "still forces reckless oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on other public lands; sharply reduces the royalties paid to the American people when fossil fuel companies deplete our natural resources; allows special interests to effectively buy their way out of legal scrutiny when launching new development projects; and dramatically expands mining and logging" on federal lands.

"We appreciate Rep. (Ryan) Zinke's work to prevent the House from selling our public lands to pay for tax cuts for the rich," said TWS President Tracy Stone-Manning, referring to legislation sponsored by Zinke, R-Montana, and Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-NM, to block the sale of federal lands. "But even without selling off public lands, the so-called ‘one big beautiful bill’ is just one big giveaway. By opening hundreds of millions of acres to drilling, mining and logging to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, this bill harms the tens of millions of people who like to hike, recreate or find solace in the outdoors. We now call on the Senate to protect our public lands for future generations and reject this massive giveaway to powerful corporate interests.”

At Defenders of Wildlife, Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations, said the bill "would cause permanent and far-reaching damage to wildlife conservation, and we urge the Senate to reject it."

"The House has given the American people a bill with pay-to-play permitting fees and unchecked logging and energy extraction along many other provisions designed to increase corporate profit at the expense of our public health and natural habitats," he continued in a release. "This is a clear-cut case of the House selling out America’s wildlife and their habitats so that the oil, gas and logging industries can make more money.” 

According to Defenders, the measure calls for an increase in timber production by a minimum of 25 percent and requires annual issuance of 20-year contracts in each region of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. 

It also would require quarterly lease sales of onshore oil and gas in any state with available land, including Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada and Alaska; require no fewer than 30 offshore lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico in a 15-year period, and; require no fewer than six lease sales in Cook Inlet, Alaska over a 10-year period.

Also critical of the legislation was Green Latinos.

“This proposal sacrifices the health, safety, and stability of working-class families to solely benefit polluters and the ultra-wealthy at a time when the United States is grappling with rising inflation, ecosystem degradation, unprecedented climate disasters, and persistent gaps in healthcare access," said the group's founding president and CEO, Mark Magaña. "This vote is clearly a step backward. It abandons our clean energy future, undermines public health protections, and exacerbates the inequities that the working-class communities struggle to overcome every day."

Rep. Bruce Westerman, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said passage of the legislation "marks a historic day for America as the House took action to provide tax relief for working Americans, make generational investments in the American economy and unleash the full potential of America’s natural resources."

"The Natural Resources title of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will generate billions of dollars in new revenue for the federal government, restore American energy dominance, turbocharge critical mineral development, streamline permitting processes and promote an all-of-the-above energy future," the congressman added. "This comprehensive legislation is the result of months of tireless work by House Republicans. It will grow the American economy, put billions back into the pockets of American families, create countless new jobs and set our nation on the path to a stronger and brighter future."

Rep. Jared Huffman, a Californian who is the top Democrat on the committee, had a decidedly different take on the legislation.

"This is the most environmentally destructive bill in American history. Let’s call this what it is: One Big Bailout for Billionaires, paid for by gutting our environmental protections, auctioning off our public lands, and dragging us back to the days when rivers caught fire, the air choked our lungs, and polluters ruled unchecked," said Huffman. “Every American household will see their energy bills go up thanks to Trump and his GOP enablers. And while they’re at it, they’re killing over 830,000 American jobs, wiping out $1 trillion in GDP, and kicking 14 million Americans off their healthcare—all so their billionaire cronies can get even richer at our expense.

“This is what Trump’s golden age of grift looks like: corporate polluters get sweetheart deals, clean energy gets the middle finger, and communities get left in the dust," he added.

When President Donald Trump earlier this year issued an executive order calling for more logging from federal lands, he directed the secretaries of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, to determine how to increase timber production on federal lands and strive for “sound forest management.”

A follow-up secretarial order from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins identified 59 percent of the 144 million acres the Forest Service manages as under consideration for heightened logging and outlined a goal of increasing timber production by 25 percent.

Trump’s order also told Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to “streamline” consultations regarding threatened or endangered species that might get in the way of logging and directed him and Secretary Rollins, if necessary, to use categorical exclusions to comply with NEPA “and reduce unnecessarily lengthy processes and associated costs related to administrative approvals for timber production, forest management, and wildfire risk reduction treatments.”

“All relevant agencies shall eliminate to the maximum extent permissible by law, all undue delays within their respective permitting processes related to timber production,” Trump’s order stated.

The federal government owns around a third of forest acreage in the United States, most of it designated for non-timber uses. More than half of the nation’s forest land is privately owned and accounts for the bulk of timber removed from the nation's forests, according to Forest Service data.  

The National Parks Traveler, in a story examining both the president's executive order and Fix Our Forests Act legislation in both the House and the Senate, reported that a study by the National Association of Forest Owners says that private forest owners are growing 53 percent more wood than they harvest. They’d presumably have no incentive to welcome increased timber production on federal lands that could drive down the price, said a private sector expert on the timber industry who discussed the issue on condition that their name not be used.