Natural Resources Management Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the Land and Conservation Fund was enacted for a laudable goal; that is, to promote recreational opportunities on our Federal public lands. But in recent decades, the program has regrettably drifted far from its original intent and has become rife with abuse.

Indeed, the Land and Water Conservation Fund--or LWCF, as it is often described--has instead been used as a primary tool for more Federal land acquisition rather than to actually help people access or to help the government care for the land we already manage.

Through the LWCF, the Federal Government has added more and more land to its already vast estate, currently totaling 640 million acres of land in this country. To put that in perspective, that is bigger than about seven major European countries combined--and I don't mean their public lands; I mean the entire countries themselves--nearly one-third of all land in the United States. This is 640 million acres. That includes a whole lot of land for the Federal Government, and no single owner, for that matter, could ever be able to take care of it. But the Federal Government is failing to take care of these lands; make no mistake about it.

Indeed, the magnitude of unfunded needs on these public lands is staggering. There is an $18.5 billion maintenance backlog on Federal lands, including $11.6 billion in the National Park System alone.

Wildfires have run rampant in the West because of mismanagement and neglect. Ill-kept roads and trails have actually kept citizens from accessing these national treasures, and the American people are paying the price.

The package before us currently reauthorizes this broken program, denying us any leverage--any real opportunity--to regularly reform the program in the future.

Senator Lankford and I have offered several amendments that would help address this program, but at the very least, we ought not to be permanently reauthorizing it without any of these conditions in place.

That is why I have offered an amendment that would reauthorize for 5 years the Land and Water Conservation Fund so that we are forced to reassess the program at a later date and can hopefully correct and improve the program to actually empower the States with recreation opportunities.

To that end, I encourage my colleagues to vote for this amendment.

I call up my amendment No. 162.
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