01.19.16

Grijalva Highlights Years of Unaccounted Costs to Taxpayers, Urges More Accurate CBO Scores for Federal Property Trades and Sales

Washington, D.C. – Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is calling on House and Senate Budget Committee leaders to direct the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to more accurately score the costs to taxpayers of federal land sales and trades. Bills offered in Congress that seek to conserve or protect public lands require a budgetary offset. If CBO scoring rules were changed as Grijalva is requesting, legislation to trade or give away public lands would require the same offset. They currently do not.

Existing CBO rules require any analysis of congressional proposals to sell or trade federal land to disregard the value of public lands themselves – even those for which the Interior Department already has a professionally assessed value – unless extractive activities such as oil or gas drilling or timber harvesting are taking place. As Grijalva notes, this has very likely led to many years of severe economic hits to taxpayers.

In a Jan. 15 letter not previously made public, Grijalva writes to both committees’ chairmen and ranking members in part:

Requiring CBO to assume that all federal land not currently being developed is worthless is absurd. Legislation divesting taxpayers of their land is scored as a loss only if timber, coal, or oil are being extracted, but not if the sale of that same land means the loss of a sacred site, a serene and iconic view shed, critical habitat, or public access to historic landmarks. Perversely, legislation expanding protections for existing federal land would ‘score’ as increasing spending, while a bill simply giving the land away for free would not. Rather than providing neutral information, current scoring rules incentivize divestiture and disincentivize conservation.

The Interior Department already assesses federal land proposed for sale or trade, whether or not extractive industries are present. As the letter makes clear, CBO experts have no reason not to include those figures in their assessments of proposed legislation’s costs and benefits.

The letter does not ask CBO or Grijalva’s fellow lawmakers to create any new valuation metrics or assess hard-to-score factors such as the financial value of a piece of sacred Native American land. Grijalva is seeking only to have CBO scores reflect existing financial record-keeping at the Interior Department.

The financial impact of the change would be hard to calculate, but at a minimum it would more accurately reflect the cost to taxpayers of bills that propose to give away federal land to state or private interests. Such bills have been a focus of the Federal Lands Action Group led since last year by Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah).

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