Was the Great American Outdoors Act a back door route for Trump to achieve his privatization goals?
That's a good question, and one we are about to find out the answer to in the next year.
The GAOA provide permanent and full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, LWCF. Those are off-shore oil & gas royalties that fund LWCF.
In addition to the post by
@sclancy27 about maintenance uses of LWCF, a portion of LWCF is supposed to be used to increase access and consolidation of inholdings. The list for acquisitions for increasing critical access and consolidation of inholdings has already be approved for 2024, just waiting for Congressional appropriation, something that is supposed to happen before the end of the Federal Fiscal Year of September 30. Since Congress hasn't been able to pass a budget within the appropriate time frames, the Federal Government runs off "continuing resolutions," crafted from a fiscal crisis a few hours before the Federal Government shuts down.
So, with the list approved, the money already collected and earmarked, guess what Senator Lee, R-UT, Chair of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee has announced?
He will not approve any budget that includes the "acquisition" projects approved and waiting funding.
End result is we think we have a big victory with the passage of the GAOA. Then someone gives the keys to the public land house to Mike Lee, the biggest anti-public land zealot of all 535 members of Congress. Nobody is will to say boo, shit, or maybe to him. Rather, they give him some rah rah "atta boys."
The list attached hereto is likely not going to get funded. If some Senators push hard enough, the projects in their states might get funded. So rather than govern, Mike Lee gets to gum up the entire works of the GAOA and we will lose all these projects as the owners have private groups standing by with checkbooks ready to act if the Federal funding falls through..
And some of us have to clear our calendars to go to DC for a week to try convince some of the western Senators to push back on Lee. Whether or not they will is anybody's guess. If they won't push back, the GAOA is all for naught; it becomes a joke, another victim of the political bullshit, and further confirmation to my theory that the Republican Party's efforts to liquidate our public lands is the same as the Democratic Party's effort to take my guns. No difference, just two different sides of the elected officials who want to bullshit us and ask us to not hold them accountable for their dereliction of duty.
Fortunately, one of those two important issues has a 2nd Amendment, the Constitution, and the Courts as my defense. The other issue is left to the citizens to fight off the well-funded privateers, a struggle that is has the Congressional sympathizers like Mike Lee in the corner of the anti-public land movement.
Attached is the list if anyone wants to see the projects, years in the making, going down the tubes if none of the Republican senators are willing to stand up to Mike Lee. Total is 206,000 acres, either via purchase or easements, that would solve a lot of access and inholding problems, for $185 million, or 20% of the total money collected and earmarked for LWCF under the GAOA.
So to answer the question quoted above, "We're gonna soon find out if the Great American Outdoors Act was a back door route for Trump to achieve his privatization goals?" And right now, Mike Lee and the anti-public land sympathizers in Congress hold are hell bent on making the answer to that question be, "YES."
www.theatlantic.com
