(Editor's note: Since this letter was written, the Senate and House did indeed pass the Big Beautiful Bill, but without the proposal pushed by Utah Sen. Mike Lee to sell off a portion of federal lands in the West.)

Dear editor:

About a year ago, I wrote a letter to the editor regarding the 2024 election. I suggested that if Donald Trump were elected, he would not listen to the rule of law and overstep that which would be considered presidential authority. Plenty of things I mentioned in that piece still remain relevant today, but something that has been on the minds of a lot of Wyomingites recently has to do with the sale of public lands. 

While over three-quarters of Park County, Wyoming, voted for Donald Trump, I am willing to bet that most of the residents here aren’t willing to give up their access to public land by having it sold off. After all, the access to public land contributes heavily to the economy via tourism and recreation. It just doesn’t make sense that Republicans would be so against conservation. After all, Republican voters are more often than not big supporters of wildlife conservation groups such as Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation, Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, and countless others. When you look through this legislation, it seems to upend much of what those groups have fought for all these years.

This new “Big Beautiful Bill” that the president is pushing is not only one of the most radical pieces of legislation the American government has ever witnessed, but if it passes, it could turn into something extremely ugly. Millions across the country would be subject to losing access to food, medicine or lifesaving health care, and it would add a few trillion to the deficit and make taxes and expenses more pricey. This bill is so bad that a few House Republicans who usually swear by their Trump bibles quickly turned around and scoffed at some of the absurd things included within, which is unusual within the current Republican Party attitude of “doing whatever Mr. President wants us to do.”

If anything, the Big Beautiful Bill would make the promise to the American people to “cut waste, fraud and abuse” null and void. If the solution to whittling away the national debt is to sell the national forests and the public lands that belong to each and every one of us in order to make a buck for logging companies and for multi-million-dollar ranches to be built and sold to rich jerks from another state, it’s not a very good one. 

Shrinking the biodiversity of the environment and making our previously beautiful state uglier is not even close to being worth $40 trillion, but to the state of Wyoming, these lands mean everything. If the bill passes, it would mean trouble for years to come as it would take so much effort to repeal or amend or straight up amputate the act from our Constitution. It took 13 years to end Prohibition, and if everything falls into place like the president wants, irreparable damage could be done in that time, or even longer. 

If you are as attached to these public lands as I am, then you should be very upset that the government is increasingly closer to taking away your access to the land that is constitutionally afforded to each and every man and woman in this country. And we should still be allowed to share this place and the things we learn from these places with the people we love and strangers from across the world, and that can’t happen if the federal government decides that our land would be utilized best by selling it off to rich folk in order to prevent even richer folk from paying slightly more taxes. 

Charlie Larsen

Powell