Military Construction, The Department of Veterans Affairs, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

I wish to point out the Federal Government currently owns over 600 million acres of land throughout the United States. In the opinion of many Americans, that is way too much. Some of my colleagues are pushing a piece of legislation that would reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund--or LWCF--a program that is primarily used for land acquisition, and they want to do this without making a single reform to that same program.

Before taking such a drastic and I believe misguided step, I would ask my colleagues to examine the Federal Government's current landholdings and in particular evaluate the manner in which they are being maintained.

In many Western States, the largest landholder is the Federal Government. In my home State of Utah, the Federal Government owns close to 70 percent of the land within the State. This reality is hard for a lot of my colleagues from States east of the Mississippi River to even comprehend.

Imagine if the Federal Government could tell your constituents where they could live, recreate, hunt and fish, and how they could earn a living. Imagine that the Federal Government used its vast landholdings to block developments of the valuable natural resources. Imagine further that the Land and Water Conservation Fund was used to acquire privately held lands from your constituents.

Given how much land the Federal Government owns, it is not surprising to find out that much of it is rather poorly maintained. Specifically, the Department of the Interior currently has a maintenance backlog on Federal public lands with an estimated cost between $13.5 and $20 billion. Instead of looking to acquire even more land through the LWCF, the Federal Government should focus on properly managing the land it already owns.

Make no mistake, LWCF is a land acquisition program. According to a Congressional Research Service report from October 2014: ``The $16.8 billion appropriated throughout the history of the LWCF program has been unevenly allocated among federal land acquisition (62%), the state grant program (25%), and other purposes (13%).''

Today we are talking about the expiration of the LWCF's ability to accrue additional revenues to the fund--nothing more, nothing beyond that, just that. According to CRS, LWCF currently has an unappropriated balance of around $20 billion that can be appropriated to implement LWCF projects. If we assume the current rate of appropriations, roughly $300 million per year, it would take around 60 years before that Fund was exhausted. At full appropriation, $900 million, it would take about 20 years. When we wake up tomorrow after allowing LWCF's authorization to expire, nothing will have substantively changed. Both the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee are working to reform the LWCF to address the numerous issues I have raised. I know I speak for many of my colleagues in the West when I say that LWCF reform, especially with regard to Federal land acquisition, is a necessary condition of reauthorization.

On that basis, I object.

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