Montana Leaders Are Flirting With The Land Transfer Movement
Mingling with those who have pushed to privatize public lands was too toxic for the campaign trail. Not anymore.
When freshman Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) was running for office last year, he failed to disclose that he had served on the board of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Montana-based nonprofit that promotes “free market environmentalism” and has a history of advocating for the privatization of federal acres.
After I reported Sheehy’s ties to PERC in a story for HuffPost, his campaign worked to distance Sheehy from the group, going as far as to apparently doctor a TV advertisement to conceal PERC’s logo from a shirt he was wearing. PERC also went into damage control, disassociating itself from its own former president Terry Anderson and his calls to divest federal public lands.
With the election now behind him, Sheehy no longer feels the need to keep PERC at arm’s length. On Monday, PERC CEO Brian Yablonski posted to Instagram a photo of himself with Sheehy, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and two current PERC board members.
“Montana’s two U.S. Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy (former PERC board member) are championing true bipartisan legislative efforts, supported by PERC research and policy expertise, to reduce red tape and litigation that stymies common sense, science-based public lands forest management,” Yablonski wrote. “Along with PERC board members Loren Bough and Brad Levine, we spent some time with our hometown forest reform senators up in Big Sky. A PERC board reunion of sorts too.”
Republicans in Western states have long sought to wrest control of public lands from the federal government, either through sale or transferring them to state control. The Montana GOP adopted a party platform in June that explicitly calls for the “granting of federally managed public lands to the state, and development of a transition plan for the timely and orderly transfer.”
Sheehy’s reconciliation with PERC comes as critics of federal land management are feeling emboldened, now that the GOP has regained control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
Take Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, who himself has voiced support for transferring management authority of federal lands to states. After telling Montana voters during his successful reelection bid last year that he believes “public lands belong in public hands,” Gianforte recently took to social media to share a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which Anderson, PERC’s longtime former executive director and a current senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, called on billionaire Elon Musk and Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to take a "sharp knife to land management agencies" and "turn ownership of some federal lands over to the states.”
Sean Southard, a spokesperson for Gianforte, said the governor’s position on public lands remains unchanged. The reason Gianforte touted the WSJ piece, he said, is because it highlighted that Montana’s management of state lands generated $92 million in revenue last year for public schools.
“The governor indeed believes public lands belong in public hands,” Southern wrote in an email.
At a press conference last month, Gianforte was asked what he would say if the Trump administration proposed transferring ownership of federal lands to states.
“It’s a hypothetical,” he said. “We’ve been advocating for expanded state management of federal lands because we can do a better job than the feds can. If they make that proposal, we’ll let you know at that time.”
Gianforte elevated Anderson’s pro-transfer op-ed just as the dust began to settle from the Montana Senate race, when public lands and PERC’s record emerged as major issues.
As I previously reported at HuffPost, Sheehy stepped on a third rail early in his campaign by calling for federal lands to be “turned over to state agencies, or even counties.” He spent the rest of the race working to recast himself as public land champion, vowing to oppose any attempt to sell off or transfer federal lands — an effort complicated by his failure to disclose his position on PERC’s board, a violation of Senate rules that his campaign called an “oversight.” He later tapped both a PERC board member and a pro-transfer hunting outfitter to star in public lands-focused campaign ads.
PERC describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan conservation organization and has pushed back at being labeled “right-wing,” despite its historical financial ties to the fossil fuel industry and Donors Trust, the massive conservative dark money organization. Kimberley Dennis, the co-founder and board chair of Donors Trust, is a member of PERC’s board of directors. And PERC is a “partner” of the State Policy Network, a network of right-wing think tanks that has worked for decades to undermine environmental regulations and climate science.
After Sheehy defeated incumbent Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Yablonski published a column in the Bozeman Chronicle titled, “Setting the Record Straight on PERC’s Support for Public Lands.” In it, he wrote that a "politically slanted online news outlet" (presumably me and HuffPost) leveled a "false accusation" that PERC "advocates for selling off public land.”
“It turns out the origins of this canard date back to an essay a former employee wrote for another organization a quarter-century ago,” he wrote.
The piece Yablonski was referring to wasn’t written by just any former employee, but PERC’s co-founder and then-director. The 1999 policy paper, titled “How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands,” laid out what Anderson and his two co-authors described as “a blueprint for auctioning off all public lands over 20 to 40 years.” The paper was published by the Cato Institute and co-authored by Vernon Smith, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2002, and Emily Simmons, then a research fellow at PERC.
PERC has said that Anderson’s paper “is not representative of PERC’s current thinking.” At a debate against Tester in October, Sheehy falsely claimed that “no one, including myself, in that organization has ever advocated for selling our public lands — never have, never will.”
Sheehy's office declined to comment for this article. Yablonski did not address specific questions but said, “My op-ed speaks for itself, as does PERC's work supporting public lands.”
This week, Public Domain took a closer look at Anderson’s writings and found a piece he penned for the New York Times in 2016 — 17 years after the policy paper that Yablonski and PERC have downplayed.
In it, Anderson, who at the time was still a senior fellow at PERC, condemned federal land management across the West as “disastrous” and argued that “commodity production lands” — hundreds of millions of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service acres — “could and should be turned over to the states, if not privatized.”
The piece, which can still be found on PERC’s website and was published approximately three years after Yablonski joined the nonprofit’s board, was part of a forum in which the NYT asked Anderson and five other contributors to weigh in on whether the federal government should continue to own so much land in Western states. At the time, armed right-wing militants had taken control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.
“Now that armed confrontation has brought attention to their cause,” Anderson wrote, referring to Western ranchers, loggers and farmers, “we need to consider policies that will devolve management to lower levels of government and get the incentives right for encouraging environmental and fiscal responsibility. The big challenge will be to find politicians with the courage to become real policy rebels.”
Anderson may finally be getting his wish. As Public Domain reported earlier this month, the GOP is waging a multi-pronged attack on America’s public lands — your lands — and the federal agencies responsible for managing and stewarding them into the future.
Asked about Yablonski describing him as a “former employee” and PERC isolating itself from him and his work, Anderson called it “gut wrenching.” As he sees it, PERC is not the research institute it once was, but a think tank with different ideas.
“I think that that has led PERC to distance itself from political hot potatoes — privatizing public lands is as hot as they get — and therefore distance itself from previous research that might lead someone like Tim Sheehy to get in trouble if he was associated with the organization,” Anderson told Public Domain.
Whereas Sheehy and PERC have retreated from federal land transfer and privatization, Anderson remains steadfast, although he acknowledges that he’s “not in the political sandbox” where supporting such changes can cost a person political support.
“My forehead probably has a thicker skull from beating it against the privatization wall for most of my career,” he said. “But I’m not going to stop.”