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E&E News reports that Sen. Steve Daines of Montana is negotiating to sell off public lands as part of the budget reconciliation bill making its way through Congress. The news is a flip-flop for Daines, who previously supported the Great American Outdoors Act and had pledged to never support the sale of public lands.
But Daines now says he is working with Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who is determined to include a sell-off to help pay for President Donald Trump's tax cuts. The current version of the bill is projected to add $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years.
Daines was non-committal on what size of a sell-off he would find acceptable, telling E&E “It’d be very, very narrow in scope … I told him I’m gonna have to see some significant changes in what he has.”
Lee said he'll reveal which public lands he wants to sell as soon as next Monday, adding that the provision would not be identical to what was added to the House version by Reps. Celeste Maloy and Mark Amodei.
The news of Daines aligning himself with Lee puts Daines at odds with his fellow Montanan, Rep. Ryan Zinke, who led a successful bipartisan push to strip the Maloy/Amodei sell-off from the House bill.
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Will we have enough resources for fire? That's a different question, because when it's busy, it takes everybody that we have. All of our state partners, our local partners, it's really all hands on deck when fire season gets going.”
