Quoted By:
I'm just going to remind everyone that changing the regulatory power of the federal government or transferring federal land to state entities has been a part of the GOP platform for decades.
Normally the platform will call for inefficiencies or abuses of federal land to be stamped out either by institutional reorganization or by transfer to a state government. There is nothing new under the sun, and it would be politically impossible to "sell off" national parkland.
The Tongass Nat'l Forest, for example, the largest in the Nat'l Forest system in both total acreage and old growth acreage, is routinely logged by private companies UNDER CONTRACT from the federal government, and yet nobody gives a flying fuck, and every year more old growth stands are logged. Ironically, private logging in many locations in the Tongass would actually be less viable under private or state ownership, as the US Forest Service has lost over one billion dollars in the business of timber sales in the Tongass since 1980, and it seems likely that without this inadvertent "subsidy", commercial logging in the forest would be restricted to only the most welcoming terrain. States don't have the budget to throw money into this pit, and private entities by their existence will only try to make money, which is impractical in this area of the state.
The main focus of this agenda is to reduce funding deficits in public services like the NFS/NPS, usually by offering more logging/mineral contracts, or by eliminating public subsidies for resource extraction to "maintain" regional industry, as has been done in the Tongass.
I feel like it's just shill bait when people scream "THE REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO BUILD CONDOS IN YOSEMITE!!!!111"