Benji Backer, executive chairman and founder of the American Conservation Coalition, recently took to X in hysterics over the Senate reconciliation bill’s inclusion of the HOUSES Act, a proposal to use a minuscule fraction of our excessive federal land stock to address the housing crisis. In his post, Backer said Senate Republicans were “secretly trying to sell 3 MILLION acres of America’s public land for development. And it includes some of my favorite places, specifically ones in the pictures below,” posting pictures that included a shot of Lake Constance in Olympic National Park.
There are two major problems with Backer’s post that threaten to rob the public of a serious policy debate on the legislation. First, there has never been anything secret about the proposal, which was announced more than half a decade ago at the Sutherland Institute as a kind of “new Homestead Act,” hearkening back to the 19th-century policy that gave earnest, hardworking U.S. citizens land to cultivate.
