John Kennedy On Federal Land Policy: 'You Don't Have To Be An Astrophysicist To Figure This Out...'

15 hours ago

In Senate floor remarks last night, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) warned about the current state of federal land policy.

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Transcript

00:00two subjects to today. First I want to talk about assets. We've been talking a

00:10lot about spending in the federal budget and tax dollars but there's a there's

00:18another side to the ledger that sooner or later in my judgment we need to talk

00:22about. Here's what I'm I'm getting at. 25% of the land in the United States of

00:31America is owned by the federal government. 25%. In some states it's a lot

00:38more than 25%. That's just an average. It's 620 million acres. Now if you

00:48inherited 620 million acres what would you do? Well the first thing you would do

00:55is you would be careful to conserve it out of respect for the land. You would

01:02want to make sure that what land wasn't contaminated, that it was properly

01:08fenced. You'd want to preserve it. Second thing you would do is say well how can I

01:14monetize this property? I got 620 million acres here. I'm land poor. What

01:22can I do to have the land generate some income? Under our federal government the

01:30Bureau of Land Management is responsible for managing the 620 million acres and

01:38the charge to our Bureau is to do a couple things. Number one conserve the

01:43land. Number two make sure, because it belongs to the American people, make

01:48sure that people have an opportunity to recreate on the land. And number three

01:56see if you can manage the land in a way to generate cash. Why is that important?

02:02Why is that especially important right now? Our debt's 36.5 trillion dollars.

02:09What does that mean? I mean we throw around this this figure of a trillion we

02:14can hardly get our mind around. At least I can hardly get mine around. Our debt is

02:21so high and we're paying so much interest that the debt grows by 1

02:30trillion dollars every 100 days. So this 36.5 trillion figure, 100 days

02:39from now, a little over three months, it's gonna be 37.5 trillion. That's how

02:44fast the debt's growing. This number is so high and we're paying so much in

02:50interest that debt accrues at 10 billion dollars a day, not million, 10 billion

02:57dollars a day. 417 million dollars it goes up an hour. 6.9, let's call it

03:087 million a minute. What have I been talking, three minutes? Debt just got

03:14increased 21 million dollars and we've got to pay that money back. This is not

03:19funny money. We're talking about how to start paying it back by reducing our

03:25spending but there's another way. It's to generate income through our 620 million

03:31acres of land. Take our national parks for example. First thing we want to do

03:38our natural parks is preserve them. I mean they're beautiful. That's why they're

03:43national parks. We want to preserve them and respect them and

03:50protect them environmentally and otherwise. We also want to allow

03:56people to enjoy them and we do that by telling folks come on in. You have to pay

04:03an entrance fee but it's reasonable if you want to come in and camp or

04:07just walk around and enjoy the scenery, go on a hike and a few and

04:15that generates some money. You don't want the entrance fee to be too high but you

04:20want it to be reasonable and in some of our national parks actually allow mining,

04:27oil and gas production, timber production so that increases income as well. I have

04:38seen an estimate from the private sector, there are several of these, that our

04:43public land, our 620 million dollars if we managed that land properly could

04:50generate 90 million dollars in revenue. Ninety million dollars could be

04:58generated by our public land. How? Through a mineral harvesting, natural gas

05:05production, oil drilling, grazing for agriculture, hunting licenses, fishing

05:13licenses, camping permits. You know what our federal lands actually generate

05:21money? We know the potential, 90 billion a year, that help us pay down this debt.

05:28In 2023 our federal lands actually lost money. They lost 13 billion dollars. We

05:40went from a potential of 90 billion dollars according to land use experts,

05:45that's what they ought to be generating, to a loss of 13 billion dollars. It's

05:51embarrassing. Now I don't want to blame all of it on the past administration. It

05:58wasn't all President Biden's fault but some of it was. Under President

06:06Biden, not him but his people, he appointed them, they banned offshore

06:12drilling off of most of America's coastlines. They prohibited mining on

06:19over a million acres of lands. They canceled leases for oil and natural gas

06:25production. They paused all new permits for LNG, which Europe is hungry for. They

06:33restricted hunting, they restricted fishing, they restricted hiking, and they

06:39buried our federal lands in red tape. That's why we lost 13 billion dollars

06:45instead of gaining 90 billion dollars a year. It doesn't have to be this way. All

06:52we have to do is look at the states. The states have state land. They don't have

06:57620 million acres like the federal government does but they

07:02got a lot of land. The states have worked very hard to increase the revenue

07:08on their state lands while preserving them. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico,

07:18all we have to do is copy them. Their activities, their preservation of their

07:24property, but their monetizing of their state lands has produced over the past

07:30few years an average return of $14.51 for every one dollar those states have

07:38invested. So the states spend one dollar on their state lands, they get back 15

07:43bucks. Pretty good return. And they haven't sacrificed air quality. They've

07:51protected their lakes and rivers and they've preserved their state land. The

07:57federal government, for every one dollar we spend on our public land, we get

08:06back 73 cents. So we put out a buck and we get back 73 cents. You don't have to

08:14be Euclid to see that we're going backwards here. We need to do better and

08:21I know that the focus right now, Madam President, is on spending and it should

08:27be. And it's on designing a tax code that looks like somebody designed it on

08:31purpose and it should be. All those things are important. But at some point

08:37we need to recognize the enormous amount of assets that the American people own

08:45through their federal government. And the fact that we are actually losing money

08:51by the way we are managing them instead of generating money. And once again, this

08:57is not, you don't have to be an astrophysicist to figure this out. All we

09:03got to do is call Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and probably West Virginia

09:10and just say, would y'all come up to Washington? We'll buy you a soda and give

09:15you a nice hat if you'll come on up here and tell us how you're doing it. And just

09:19copy what they're doing.

John Kennedy On Federal Land Policy: 'You Don't Have To Be An Astrophysicist To Figure This Out...'

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