Imagine this: You arrive at your favorite trailhead and find it locked behind a steel gate. A "PRIVATE PROPERTY – NO TRESPASSING" sign stands where a park map once was. The forest is fenced off for drilling. The lake where your family fished is surrounded by heavy machinery. The trees that gave you shade were chainsawed and replaced with unaffordable housing developments. The wildlife is gone.
This isn't a distant threat. It's what could happen if Congress passes Trump's budget bill.
The plan would sell off up to 3 million acres of public land, which is more than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon National Parks combined. These aren't forgotten places. They are where we hike, camp, and connect with nature. These lands are OUR lands. And, if they're sold, they're lost forever.
This bill is a direct assault on our environment and climate future, and it is nothing short of an existential threat for America's public lands - period. To add insult to injury, these treasured landscapes are being sold to cover the cost of tax cuts to billionaires.
The bill is moving fast through the Senate. We can still stop it, but only if we act now.
This bill is packed with dangerous public lands provisions that would:
Sell off millions of acres of our public land to special interests, corporate polluters, and private developers.
Mandate oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening one of the nation's most pristine ecosystems to industrial drilling.
Weaken environmental oversight by limiting public input and blocking judicial review.
Require multiple oil and gas lease sales annually without new environmental safeguards.
Initiate long-term timber contracts across National Forests, increasing timber output year over year.
All of this destruction is designed to fund even more tax breaks for billionaires and corporate polluters. Meanwhile, the burden of rising costs will fall even harder on working families.
We've stopped public land sell-offs before, and we can do it again. Just last month, a proposal like this one was stripped from the House version of the budget bill after a massive public outcry. Thousands of people like you spoke up, took action, and made it impossible for lawmakers to ignore. That win proved what we already know: when we raise our voices together, we can protect the places we love.
But with the threat revived in the Senate, the Sierra Club is mobilizing to stop it again. We're organizing our grassroots supporters, pressuring lawmakers, and sounding the alarm nationwide, but we can't do it without you.
