The 84% Loophole
84% of Montanans say no to the sell-off. That’s the loud fight. The quiet one is where we need to focus.
84% of Montana voters want a ban on selling public lands.
80% of Republicans. 80% of Independents. 90% of Democrats. The University of Montana’s 2026 Voter Survey on Public Lands. Strongest “no” the pollsters say they have ever measured.
Good. That number matters.
It just isn’t the fight.
Selling public land is the loud version of the play. It triggers everybody. Hunters, ranchers, conservationists, the Boone & Crockett Club, Backcountry Hunters and Angler, the Wild Sheep Foundation, both Montana senators (only when they talk on podcasts or to the public), the Bitterroot county commission.
Mike Lee tried it last summer. 3 million acres. Tucked into the budget bill at midnight.
Then the Wilderness Society read the actual bill text. The language was loose enough that up to 250 million acres of BLM and Forest Service land were technically eligible to be nominated for sale. Lee said three. The bill said up to two hundred and fifty.
It died inside of a week.
Even Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, went on record against it.
This is the part people miss. The “sell it” play is easy to beat.
The system works on this one. The bipartisan coalition is real. The polling is overwhelming. Sell-off pitches still come, but they're easy to kill. The land stays on the map.
So nobody serious is doing it that way anymore.
Here’s what they’re doing instead.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Passed, signed, currently law, that mandates quarterly oil and gas lease sales in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Alaska. Locked into the calendar.
Both Montana senators voted yes. Daines. Sheehy. The same Sheehy who came out hard against the Lee amendment three weeks earlier.
It cut the federal onshore royalty rate from 16.67% back down to 12.5%. Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates the onshore-plus-offshore royalty cuts will cost the public around $6 billion over the next decade.
I’m currently working on a long form piece on how this royalty system works. The federal government has let oil companies report their own production, their own prices, and their own royalties owed since 1982. They call it the honor code. The honor ran out a long time ago.
Subscribe to The Conservation Current to get updates on when this is complete.
It eliminated the expression-of-interest fee (killing the fee companies paid just to nominate a parcel for leasing. Speculative nominations are free again). It extended drilling permits to four years. It stripped federal land managers of most of their discretion to deny leases on parcels with conflicts. Wildlife corridor. Hunting unit. Hiking trail. If the protections weren't already written into a 15-year-old land-use plan, they don't exist. The lease goes through.
In January, BLM held the first quarterly Montana–North Dakota sale under the new law. 19 parcels. 4,116 acres. $8.65 million in receipts. Quiet little press release. No protest. No coalition.
That’s the play.
Then there’s the permitting side.
In November, the Trump administration’s Permitting Council added the Sheep Creek Project to the FAST-41 list. Sheep Creek sits at the headwaters of the Bitterroot River. The company developing it calls it the highest-grade rare earth and gallium deposit in North America.
FAST-41 doesn’t sell the land. It compresses environmental review and shrinks the public comment window.
Hundreds of Ravalli County residents packed a meeting in Hamilton in December. The county commissioners voted unanimously to ask the administration to remove Sheep Creek from the list. Sheehy sent a letter. Zinke sent a letter. Neither of them held a hearing. Neither of them put a hold on a nominee. The administration kept Sheep Creek on the list anyway, and the next news cycle started.
The administration kept it on anyway.
The Plan of Operations is now in front of the Bitterroot National Forest. The next decision is how light the environmental review gets to be.
Same outcome as a sale. Different paperwork.
Then the Congressional Review Act.
In late 2025, Congress used CRA resolutions to overturn Biden-era resource management plans and reopen 30 million acres in eastern Montana to coal mining. Daines cheered. Coal royalty rate also got cut in OBBBA from 12.5% down to 7%.
In December, the President signed CRA resolutions opening the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and most of the Western Arctic to oil and gas leasing.
In January, Interior submitted the Boundary Waters mineral withdrawal to Congress for CRA review, trying to undo a 20-year ban on sulfide-ore copper mining next to a 1.1-million-acre wilderness.
Earthjustice points out that prior to last year, Congress had never used the CRA to attack a public lands resource management plan. Or a mineral withdrawal. Or anything close to a national monument.
It’s a brand new weapon. It’s working.
And then there’s the part that came out two weeks ago.
The Wilderness Society obtained Department of the Interior emails through a public records request. They were shared with Public Domain. The emails show Burgum’s DOI staff helped shape Mike Lee’s sell-off talking points last summer, even while the agency publicly denied involvement. The percentages Lee used in his FAQ came from a senior Interior official. Verbatim.
That same office is now coordinating with HUD on a “housing task force” pursuing the same goal through quieter channels.
Same people. Same goal. Better packaging.
This is the disconnect the pollsters keep flagging. Voters say public lands are the issue that decides their vote. Then they vote for the same delegation that voted for OBBBA. The same delegation that fought the Lee amendment also voted yes on the bill that made Lee’s amendment unnecessary.
That isn’t quite hypocrisy.
It’s the bet.
The bet is that voters will reward them for blocking the visible thing, the sell-off, the auction block, the headline, and won’t track the quarterly lease sale, the royalty cut, the FAST-41 listing, the CRA resolution, the rule change. The visible fight is theater. The invisible one is the work.
The bet has been right so far. That puts the accountability on the voters too, which keeps you from sounding partisan while making the indictment sharper.
A 20-year lease isn’t a sale. A fast-tracked permit isn’t a sale. A royalty cut that hands operators billions isn’t a sale. A CRA resolution overturning a mineral withdrawal isn’t a sale.
The land stays federal. The use does not.
That’s the loophole the 84% doesn’t close.
So what do we need to watch.
Sheep Creek’s Plan of Operations decision at the Bitterroot National Forest.
The next quarterly Montana lease sale on the BLM calendar.
The Boundary Waters CRA resolution heading toward the President’s desk (he will pass it). The actual fight moves to Minnesota. DNR permits, state mineral leases, and whether Walz's administration has the spine to use the authority it still has. Plus a near-certain lawsuit arguing the CRA was never meant to undo a mineral withdrawal in the first place.
The Interior–HUD task force, still meeting with the same people who drafted last year’s failed pitch.
These are the fights worth showing up for. Public comment periods. Coalitions. State agencies. Local commissions. The unsexy stuff that actually moves the needle.
I built a free tracker to make it easier to follow. But trackers don’t save land. People do. This is a community thing. Always has been.
The 84% is real. The instinct is bipartisan. The poll is the strongest signal Montana voters have sent on any public lands question in twelve years of asking. And I believe its similar in other western states.
The problem is the question.
We’re being polled on the loud fight. We’re losing the quiet one.
Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in clean energy, and energy security, but it has to be done correctly.
I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.
Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.
Sources:
University of Montana Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone Initiative, 2026 Voter Survey on Public Lands;
Daily Montanan, Apr. 22, 2026 and Feb. 20, 2026;
Mountain Journal/Montana Free Press, Apr. 24, 2026; Missoula Current, “UM poll: Montanans back federal land,” 2026, and “Bitterroot rare-earth mining plan prompts more citizen concern,” Dec. 23, 2025;
BLM press releases, “Interior advances energy dominance through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (Jul. 22, 2025) and “BLM oil and gas lease sales in Montana and North Dakota generate over $8.6 million in revenue” (Jan. 13, 2026);
Taxpayers for Common Sense, “Oil, Gas, Coal Win Big in the One Big Beautiful Bill” (Aug. 28, 2025); Permitting Council press release, Nov. 19, 2025; Earthjustice, “The Little-Known Law Congress is Abusing to Sell Out Our Public Lands”;
High Country News, “Interior Department crafted talking points for public lands sell-off agenda” (Apr. 15, 2026);
Center for American Progress, Sep. 22, 2025.