Selling off some of the government’s holdings would ease fiscal stress and help the economy.
By: Thomas Sowell, Wall Street Journal
The incoming Trump administration will confront some huge financial challenges. It will have to cope with the vast increase in the national debt created by the Biden administration’s reckless spending. It will also need to maintain the solvency of the Social Security system after decades of financial irresponsibility by politicians of both parties.
On top of all this, there is an urgent need to build up American military defenses, which have been neglected while taxpayers’ money has been lavishly spent on such things as subsidizing electric cars and paying hotel expenses for illegal immigrants.
There is no question that doing all the things that urgently need doing will require huge amounts of additional government spending. The key question is: Where will the government get this money?
There is much to be said for the new administration’s plan to have a nongovernmental organization investigate how well, or how badly, government agencies are currently handling the taxpayers’ money. But there is a limit to how much money can be recovered by simply cutting back on “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal spending.
There are, however, additional billions of dollars that could be tapped, from a source that not many people think about. That is the vast—almost unbelievable—amount of land owned by the federal government. Some of that land—such as military bases—is used to house the government’s own operations. But the great majority of that land is not.
The rest of this government-owned land is so vast that there is little to compare it with—except whole countries. And not small countries like Belgium or Portugal. The amount of land owned by the National Park Service alone is larger than Italy. The land owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service is larger than Germany. The land owned by the Forest Service is larger than Britain and Spain combined. The land owned by the Bureau of Land Management is larger than Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the Philippines combined.
The idea of selling huge amounts of government-owned land is not new. Before the federal income tax was created in the early 20th century, land sales were sometimes a significant source of federal government income in the preceding two centuries. The prospect of large-scale land sales was considered during the Reagan administration, but the political opposition was too strong.
As of 2015, government-owned lands were valued at $1.8 trillion by the Commerce Department. This is the kind of money that can make a real contribution to the government’s fiscal balance, at a time when so many government operations are urgently in need of support.
As for the current value of these lands to the government, that value is largely negative. The money that these lands bring in is often only a fraction of what it costs the government to take care of them. Wildfires on land managed by the federal government have been about five times the size of wildfires on “non-federal lands,” according to a 2022 study by the Congressional Budget Office.
Land transferred from federal ownership to the market economy can also contribute to more affordable housing. When the same kind of house costs several times more in one part of the country than elsewhere, it is often because the cost of the land is higher rather than because the house costs more to build. That in turn is often because the land is either more scarce or because of laws restricting the building of anything on that land. But, where more land is available to build on, the same kind of house can cost a fraction of what it costs elsewhere.
The federal government owns a little more than one-fourth of the total land area of the United States. The time is long overdue to consider whether that is the best economic arrangement. And reconsideration is especially needed at a time of urgent fiscal problems.
Mr. Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.