Comprehensive budget legislation being pushed by the Donald Trump, referred to officially as the 2025 Budget Reconciliation and by President Trump as the Big, Beautiful Bill, called for the sell-off of public land across the country, including roughly 16 million acres in California. That included land in San Bernardino County dear to environmentalists, conservationists and those passionate about having wilderness remain as wilderness.
That provision of the bill was inserted by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a crucial ally of the president in his struggle against the Washington, D.C. establishment. Lee’s provision would apply to between 600,000 and 1.2 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in the 11 Western states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Land in San Bernardino County that was scheduled for placement on the auction block included acreage in the Angeles National Forest, extending to dense old growth trees in areas without access roads as well as on the northeast side of the forest; extensive and disparate areas within the San Bernardino National Forest, including near Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear Lake and in Barton Flats, an area south of Big Bear which stands at the west entranceway to the San Gorgonio Wilderness and the trailhead that leads ultimately to the Mount San Bernardino, Mount Shields, Mount Jepson and Mount San Gorgonio peaks; the Coyote Dry Lake Bed outside Joshua Tree National Park.
To the relief of those who want to prevent the privatization of those public lands, President Trump, even after the experience of his first term, remains virtually entirely focused on the executive function of government and has not yet grasped the importance or nature of legislative action and he has not personally bothered to cultivate the skill or ability to manipulate the Senate or the House through a combination of positive and negative reinforcement, standing strong and relenting, praise and pressure, backscratching and arm-twisting or outright political horsetrading. Nor does he have on his staff someone with that ability and he has no true allies in positions of power in either Congress or the Senate who have the status and leverage to husband a bill through the give-and-take of the legislative process.
After more than a month of using all of the force at his disposal to ramrod the bill through, while maintaining and vowing revenge against anyone who opposed the legislation he is championing, he learned, through a belated tallying, what everyone else knew from the start, which was that it is touch-and-go as to whether he has the votes needed to garner the Big, Beautiful Bill’s passage. At least 27 House Republicans have expressed opposition to one or more of the bill’s provisions. In the senate, Republican senators John Curtis of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have all made clear that the bill will need to undergo substantial revision for them to support it. This means that in both houses, President Trump will need the support of a fair share of Democrats if the bill as originally drafted is to pass, and he has burned his bridges with virtually every Democrat in the country.
As poor as his prospects with the bill were in that regard, he also failed to reckon with the U.S. Senate’s parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who has held that post since 2012, through both Republican and Democratic administrations and through both Republican and Democratic House and Senate majorities.
MacDonough’s rulings with regard to the legalities within legislation and conflict with previous and existing legislation as well as U.S. Codes is critical to whether a particular bill can progress all the way through committee vetting and then go to the floor of the body for a vote.
In this way, MacDonough is seen as a referee overseeing the legislative process.
She was elevated to parliamentarian from the position of by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a middle-of-the-road Democrat from Nevada. Over the course of time, she has made rulings unpopular with both Republicans and Democrats. She was designated, as an assistant parliamentarian at the time, to advise Al Gore, who was vice president and the head of the Senate when the counting of ballots from the results of the 2000 election took place and he, the candidate for president who had arguably won in a race which the outcome was in dispute over a less than clear count in Florida, counted the votes in favor of his Republican opponent, George W. Bush. This has rendered her immune to charges that she is pro-Democrat.
With regard to the Big, Beautiful Bill, MacDonough has made a series of findings and determinations which have thrown a spanner into the works.
McDonough rejected elements of the bill pertaining to Medicaid cuts.
MacDonough also rejected including a plan to cap states’ use of health care provider taxes to get more federal Medicaid funding, along with a provision in the bill that would have revoked Medicare eligibility for some non-citizen immigrants, in particular ones who were enrolled in the system after establishing they had paid into the program, had a sufficient work history and met age and disability requirements. She rejected language that would bar federal subsidies under the Affordable Care Act from going to qualified health plans that cover abortion care. MacDonough also ruled against a provision that would have barred federal dollars from being spent on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover adults and children whose citizenship and immigration status are not immediately verifiable.
She also rejected language in the bill that would have lowered the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage grant from 90 to 80 percent in states that use funds to offer Medicaid coverage to immigrants without legal status.
MacDonough ruled against that aspect of the bill mandating increasing the Federal Employees Retirement System contribution rate for new civil servants who refuse to become at-will employees.
McDonough rejected the bill’s language that gave states the authority to conduct border security and immigration enforcement rather than having that responsibility remain with the federal government.
In her role as parliamentarian, McDonough nixed that part of the megabill that limited federal courts’ reach in issuing preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders against the executive branch of government, ruling such a limit on the ability of the judiciary to hold a president in contempt violates Senate rules.
MacDonough ruled against the inclusion in the bill of a plank that prevented immigrants who are not yet citizens or lawful permanent residents from participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
MacDonough has ruled against a provision which would have defunded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She also ruled against a measure in the bill to the Federal Reserve staff’s pay by $1.4 billion.
MacDonough red penciled cutting more than $1 billion in costs through a combination of slashing Office of Financial Research funding and getting rid of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
MacDonough shot down a provision that would exempt offshore oil and gas projects from regulations in the with the National Environmental Policy Act.
She also rejected a measure in the bill that required offshore oil and gas leases to be issued to successful bidders within 90 days after their sale.
McDonough said for the bill to advance, a provision requiring the Interior secretary to OK the construction of Ambler Road, a more than 200-mile-long access road that would facilitate the development of four large mines and hundreds of smaller mines in northern Alaska would need to be removed.
As Senate parliamentarian, McDonough rejected a provision that would force the General Services Administration, which handles the equipment used by government agencies to sell all of the electric vehicles used by the U.S. Postal Service.
McDonough said the bill could not eliminate an Environmental Protection Agency regulation that restricts air pollution emissions from passenger vehicles.
McDonough prevented a change to the National Environmental Policy Act from being included in the bill which would have allowed project developers to pay a one-time fee to ensure environmental reviews would be fast-tracked and barring any judicial reviews of those fast-tracked environmental certifications.
McDonough ruled that the bill could not be considered if it included Senator Lee’s provision that called for the sale of millions of acres of public land in the 11 states.
President Trump and several of his allies reacted by calling for the removal of McDonough as parliamentarian or the Senate taking steps to overrule her. That ground to a halt quickly, though, when the Senate Majority leader, John Thune of North Carolina, said he would be unwilling to initiate a parliamentary process to overrule McDonough or take the step that President Trump and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama advocated, which was to out-and-out fire McDonough. Thune made clear that he believed jettisoning McDonough would prove a mistake, and his strategy now hinges on removing those items that cannot be reconciled with preexisting legislation, rules, the Constitution, tradition or political reality and to change those elements of the bill which can pass parliamentary muster, thereby salvaging enough of the bill to allow the president’s agenda to progress.
The Republicans, who are still in control of both the House and Senate, have the option of retooling or making over any of the rejected provisions to bring them into parliamentary compliance and resubmit them for review, committee adjustments and a full vote.
Lee reacted by saying that he would tweak the proposal, most likely by altering it so that the federal government can dispose of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management but not land overseen by the U.S. Forest Service and limiting sales of land that are within 5 miles of a population center.
Still, there is opposition to the land sale provision that might keep it, if not out of the bill, as a feature of the legislation that will doom the entire bill if it comes to a vote.
Two significant Republicans – Donald Trump supporter both – are balking at the land sale provision.
Congressman Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as the Interior secretary during Trump’s first term and in that capacity opened some federal lands for oil, gas and mineral exploration and extraction in consonance with then-President Trump’s philosophy, is now sounding less aggressive about federal action that could impact his state, which has only two Congressional seats.
“I do not support the widespread sale or transfer of public lands,” Zinke said publicly in reaction to the inclusion of Lee’s provision in the bill. “God isn’t creating more land. Public access, sportsmanship, grazing, tourism … our entire Montanan way of life is connected to our public lands.”
Congressman Jay Obernolte, whose district includes the San Bernardino Mountains and part of its desert, indicated he would not be able to support a bill that contains Lee’s provision.
Obernolte, a Budget Committee member who is strongly in support of most of the bill’s provisions, said Lee’s effort to effectuate a wholesale sell-off of public lands is “concerning. There is a reason why public lands are public,” he said. “We have to safeguard the public’s ability to access those lands in perpetuity. Transferring them to private ownership would not allow that.”
Obernolte said he would consider some carefully calibrated and defined sales of federal land, where that property stands in the way of logical growth and expansion. One such example of that, he said, is the area surround Bishop in Inyo County, which he previously represented. Bishop, with a population of 3,819, is entirely surrounded by federal land.