Politics

The U.S. government currently owns 28% of the land in the United States, which is way too much.

Steven Calabresi | 1.5.2026 10:39 AM

The federal government owns approximately 640 million acres of the 2.4 billion acres that constitute the United States of America. You might be astonished to know that less than one half of that total consists of our invaluable Great National Park system, our U.S. protected forest lands, and our protected grasslands. Moreover, the federal government's holdings are almost entirely in twelve western states, where they create weird real estate markets, for reasons that can only be characterized as an historical accident. The map below shows federally owned land in red:

The enormous amounts of twelve western states that are federally owned are revealed again by this chart:

Twelve Western states account for the unequal treatment of the fifty states by the federal government, which grossly stifles private investment and skews real estate development in the States affected. The twelve Western states with skewed real estate markets include: Nevada; Utah; Idaho; Alaska; Oregon; Wyoming; California; Arizona; Colorado; New Mexico; Montana; and Washington State. 92% of the federally owned land in the United States is federally owned in these twelve Western states. There is no good policy ground for holding such huge shares of federal land in twelve states, while holding very little federal land in the other 38.

Of the 640 million acres of U.S. land, which the federal government owns, the U.S. National Parks Service manages 85 million acres, while the U.S. Forest Service manages another 193 million acres of forests and grasslands. Adding these two figures together suggests that about 278 million of........

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