JD Vance Makes Clear How Trump Would Treat Federal Lands At The Debate

A back-and-forth about federal lands during Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate shined light on how a future Trump administration — much like the first — would treat publicly owned acres as little more than landscapes to be exploited and developed.

Asked about the Republican Party platform’s proposal to pawn off federal lands to address housing affordability, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), effectively argued that undeveloped acres are serving little, if any, purpose.

“Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that are not being used for anything,” he said. “They’re not being used for a national park … and they could be places where we build a lot of housing.”

“We have a lot of land that could be used,” he added.

To be clear, many of the landscapes Vance is talking about are being used — for hunting, fishing, recreation, habitat protection and grazing, among other things. Also, it’s important to point out that keeping natural landscapes intact provides myriad public benefits, from safeguarding clean air, water and wildlife habitat to mitigating the mounting impacts of global climate change, a threat that Trump has dismissed as a “hoax.”

Under Trump and Vance, safeguarding federal lands for what they provide naturally would be an afterthought. Their idea of “use” appears narrow and exploitative.

“What would immediately change the equation for American citizens? If you lower energy prices. As Donald Trump says, ‘Drill, baby, drill,’” Vance said Tuesday, going on to blame the Biden administration for fuel prices. “If we open up American energy, you will get immediate pricing relief for American citizens, not by the way just in housing, but in a whole host of other economic goods too.”

That argument — that boosting oil and gas production would immediately lower gas prices and inflation — is one that economists and industry experts have repeatedly challenged. It conveniently ignores the fact that domestic gas prices are inherently tied to a global market, that oil companies have raked in record profits in recent years and that domestic oil and gas production are at record highs.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, repeatedly reminded Vance about current U.S. fossil fuel production on Tuesday. And he pushed back on Vance’s development-first vision for federal public lands.

“I worry about this, as someone who cares deeply about our national parks and our federal lands,” Walz said. “Look, Minnesota, we protect these things. We’ve got about 20% of the world’s freshwater. These lands protect, they’re there for a reason, they belong to all of us.”

Addressing Vance’s suggestion of using federal lands to solve America’s housing crunch, Walz voiced concern about viewing housing as a commodity and thinking about federal lands for their potential for financial gain.

“Are we going to drill and build houses on the same federal land?” he asked, adding there isn’t a lot of federal land around Minneapolis and other urban centers where housing is in high demand.

Walz’s position is a notable departure from that of the Biden administration and his own running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris. In July, the Biden-Harris administration unveiled a housing plan that called for “repurposing public land sustainably to enable as many as 15,000 additional affordable housing units to be built in Nevada.” And in a press release announcing several actions a Harris-Walz administration would take in its first 100 days to bring down costs for American families, Harris’ campaign said it would “take action to make certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for new housing developments that families can afford.”

One big champion of selling off federal lands to address housing shortages is William Perry Pendley, an anti-federal land attorney who served as Trump’s acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. In late June, Pendley published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled, “Solve the housing crisis by selling government land,” in which he grumbled about the size of the federal estate and argued Westerners “find their way to a better future impeded unnecessarily by vast swaths of federal land largely unused, unnecessary, and exorbitantly expensive to maintain.”

Pendley authored the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025, a sweeping policy blueprint that right-wing operatives compiled to guide Trump and his team should he win in November. Pendley’s vision for the federal agency is for it to effectively hand the keys to public lands across the West over to fossil fuel and other extractive industries, as HuffPost previously reported.

Public land advocates and housing experts have warned that opening public lands for housing development would do little, if anything, to address home affordability, as well as possibly open the door for construction of vacation and luxury homes that would only further exacerbate the growing housing problem.

“They realized a wholesale sell-off [of federal lands] was a political third rail, so now they’re trying to frame it as a housing solution, but what they’re actually proposing is just more sprawl and McMansions,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director at the Colorado-based conservation group Center for Western Priorities, previously told HuffPost about the Republican Party proposal.

Trump is seemingly eyeing public lands for much more than additional housing.

In a Newsweek op-ed published Tuesday detailing his plans for driving economic growth, Trump vowed to “set up special zones on federal land with ultra-low taxes and regulations for American producers, to entice the relocation of entire industries from other countries.” He also promised to slash regulations and “seriously expedite environmental approvals so we can use the resources we have right here on American soil.”

It’s not entirely clear what Trump has in mind here, but it sounds like an extension of his first-term public lands agenda that consistently prioritized drilling, mining and other exploitation over conservation.

During Tuesday’s debate, Vance slammed the Biden-Harris administration’s “regulatory regime.”

“We are a country of builders. We’re a country of doers. We’re a country of explorers,” he said. “But we increasingly have a federal administration that makes it harder to develop our resources, makes it harder to build things, and wants to throw people in jail for not doing everything exactly as Kamala Harris says they have to do. And what that means is that you have a lot of people who would love to build homes who aren’t able to build homes.”

Vance did not elaborate on the people he claimed Harris is putting in jail.

Walz prodded Vance about which regulations he wants to see scrapped.

“I think whenever we talk regulations, people think we can get rid of them. I think you want to be able to get out of your house in a fire,” Walz said.

The two vice presidential contenders also sparred on the debate stage over climate change, a threat that is both wreaking havoc on public lands across the country and being driven in no small part by fossil fuel development across the United States.

Vance condemned the Biden administration’s energy and environmental agenda, arguing that if Harris and Democrats were serious about confronting climate change, they would push for more energy production in the U.S.

“Clearly, Kamala Harris doesn’t believe her own rhetoric on this,” he said. “If she did, she would actually agree with Donald Trump’s energy policies.”

Walz reminded Vance that the Biden administration’s climate and clean energy investments have led to a boom in domestic manufacturing. And he denounced Trump for reportedly soliciting $1 billion in fossil fuel industry campaign donations in exchange for dismantling many of Biden’s green energy policies.

“To call it a ‘hoax’ and to take the oil company executives to Mar-a-Lago, say, ‘Give me money for my campaign and I’ll let you do whatever you want,’” Walz said. “We can be smarter about that, and an all-of-the-above energy policy is exactly what [Harris] is doing, creating those jobs right here.”

As much of the U.S. Southeast reels from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene, a deadly storm that researchers have already concluded was supercharged by climate change, Trump is traveling to Texas this week to solicit donations from oil and gas executives, Bloomberg reported.