In which jurisdiction does the federal government own a higher percentage of the land? Is it in the District of Columbia, which sits on the East Coast and serves as the nation's capital, or is it in California, which sits on the West Coast and is one of the 50 states?

The answer is California.

According to a Congressional Research Service report published in 2020 (and cited by this column before), the federal government owned 24.7 percent of the land in the District of Columbia as of 2018. By contrast, it owned 45.4 percent of the land in California.

That equaled a total of 45,493,133 acres in California.

Indeed, the acreage of California owned by the federal government exceeds all the acreage in each of 34 other states, according to the CRS data. It is, for example, greater than the 44,248,320 total acres that make up Missouri, or the 44,452,480 that make up North Dakota, or the 44,087,680 that make up Oklahoma.

In fact, the 45,493,133 acres that the federal government owns in California exceed the 37,057,280 acres that make up the combined territories of Connecticut (3,135,360), Delaware (1,265,920), Hawaii (4,105,600), Maryland (6,319,360), Massachusetts (5,034,880), New Hampshire (5,768,960), New Jersey (4,813,440), Rhode Island (677,120) and Vermont (5,936,640).

Nonetheless, there are six states in which the federal government........

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