Trump’s Interior secretary ignores the real value of American lands

Doug Burgum, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, told oil and gas executives in March that he believes “that the sum of our national assets is much larger than our national debt.” Burgum was suggesting that by leasing or selling off America’s public lands, the Trump administration could somehow eliminate America’s $33 trillion national debt.

Secretary Burgum is correct that America’s public lands are the nation’s greatest asset — but he ignores the fact that if President Trump were to try to sell off those lands, their value would plummet. And while Congress has frequently dreamed that wholesale leasing of America’s lands for oil and gas drilling would bring in massive revenue for taxpayers, the reality has never penciled out.

America’s public lands are, of course, priceless. It’s insulting to reduce wild rivers, soaring peaks, and red rock deserts down to a mere dollar amount. (This entire exercise is not unlike the ‘understanding poetry’ scene in Dead Poets Society: “I like Byron, I’d give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it.”) But if we’re going to quantify the unquantifiable, the least we can do as a country is be honest about what we’re measuring.

Lord Byron would be appalled at all this but here we are.

The full economic value of America’s public lands comes from the fact that they are intact landscapes that provide benefits for all Americans. From hiking and hunting to clean water and wildlife habitat, economists have the ability to measure the economic value of nature. But Donald Trump and Doug Burgum aren’t interested in getting an accurate accounting on America’s public lands, let alone taking into account the unquantifiable aspects that most other Americans value. They see only two things: land to be sold and resources to be extracted. Here’s how actual economists look at the value of lands and nature.

What are “ecosystem services?”

Economists use two interconnected concepts to put a dollar value on nature: natural capital and ecosystem services. Here’s a quick introduction:

Natural capital is the stock of natural assets in the land or ocean, like clean water, forests, soil, plants, and pollinators. Non-renewable resources like fossil fuels and minerals are also forms of natural capital. Ecosystem services are the benefits that people obtain from that natural capital. This includes food, fuel, and medicine, but also the protection that natural assets provide to all of us: for example, controlling erosion, purifying water that we drink, providing wild game habitat, and maintaining oxygen in the atmosphere. Non-material benefits are also ecosystem services: recreation and tourism, education, spiritual experiences, and even inspiration for art and poetry all have measurable financial value. (Maybe you can give Byron more than a 42 after all).

These concepts are not controversial in the world of economics. In 2021, the British government commissioned a 600-page report on the financial value of nature. The review was so influential that King Charles III made its lead author, Professor Partha Dasgupta, a Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire. Alexander Skarsgård narrated a video for the New York Times explaining the work.

In 2012, 140 nations created an independent organization, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES. IPBES issued its landmark values assessment in 2022, which complements the Dasgupta review, providing detailed tools for understanding how nature and natural capital is valued by different societies around the world.

These economic concepts are now being turned into accounting standards that can be used by any company or nation on Earth. The International Standards Organization has completed a draft standard which went to an initial vote in November 2024. That voting period closed in February 2025, and a final standard could be published this year.

So isn’t all this part of America’s balance sheet?

Not as far as Doug Burgum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are concerned. One of the Interior secretary’s go-to talking points is that America’s public lands are worth trillions of dollars on “America’s balance sheet.” But Burgum has never been specific about how he reached that conclusion.

At his confirmation hearing in January, Burgum gave a nod to the economic impacts of the recreation economy, but he suggested that intact landscapes — particularly lands that exist just as ecosystems — have no economic value.

“The assets are the land and minerals,” Burgum said. “If we restrict access, we don’t cut a tree, we don’t use it for recreation, and then we don’t develop the minerals in a sustainable and smart way, then we are getting a super low return for the American people.”

Burgum speculated that America’s natural resources might be worth $200 trillion dollars if they were extracted and monetized. The problem is that in reality, attempts to balance the budget through natural resource extraction have consistently fallen short of expectations. Let’s take oil and gas drilling as an example.

In 2017, Congress passed a tax bill that required the Bureau of Land Management to hold oil and gas lease sales in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. To help offset the costs of President Trump’s tax cuts, Congress estimated that drilling in the refuge would generate $2 billion in revenue over 10 years.

But the lease sales were a complete flop. The first sale, held during the first Trump administration, brought in just $14.4 million in bids. Of those nine leases, two were cancelled by the oil companies that bid on them and asked for their money back. The other seven leases were held by the State of Alaska itself, which was effectively bidding at half price. Those leases were cancelled because of legal deficiencies in the Trump administration’s environmental review and although the leases were restored by a judge last week, there’s no sign of industry interest or financing to actually drill there. The second refuge sale, held after the 2024 election, brought in no bids at all.

Polar bears in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Wikimedia Commons

In other words, Congress thought that opening America’s Arctic oil assets could bring in $2 billion toward America’s balance sheet. That estimate was off by roughly $2 billion. Now Doug Burgum is claiming that all of America’s oil, gas, timber, and minerals are worth 100,000 times more than that.

The notion that mining on public lands would bring in revenue is even more laughable, considering that hard rock mining is governed by a 150-year-old law. Unlike oil and gas drilling, where companies pay a royalty back to taxpayers for extracting a resource owned by the American people, mining companies pay nothing at all. Attempts to reform the mining law of 1872 to make mining companies pay a royalty have been fruitless.

What does this have to do with sovereign wealth funds?

In February, President Trump signed an executive order with the goal of creating a “sovereign wealth fund” for the United States. Sovereign wealth funds are investment funds that are owned by governments, usually in oil-rich places like Norway, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, or countries like China with massive trade imbalances.

Since sovereign wealth funds are generally funded by excess government revenue from trade or natural resource extraction, it’s rare, if not unheard of, for a country that runs huge budget deficits like the United States to own a sovereign wealth fund. Thirteen percent of U.S. spending today goes to interest payments on the national debt — roughly equivalent to what the nation spends on Medicare and national defense. Any money that goes into a U.S. sovereign wealth fund would either increase the deficit or have to be paid for in some other way. That’s where Doug Burgum’s “balance sheet” becomes so dangerous.

As the Center for American Progress points out, Trump’s plan to fund the sovereign wealth fund appears to hinge on quietly liquidating public lands. Some financial reporters appear to have bought into the fallacy that selling off public land would bring in trillions of dollars, despite all evidence to the contrary. The market value of those lands in a government auction would only be measured by the potential value of the oil, gas, or timber on the land, if the resources were extracted; or measured by the surface value of the land for future development. With a handful of exceptions (think trophy homes adjacent to Yellowstone or Zion national parks) the land value of most public land parcels is minimal — a few thousand dollars per acre at best. And for those few parcels that would bring in revenue through sales to billionaires, like the Kelly Parcel adjacent to Grand Teton National Park, the public would lose out on the value that they get from accessing America’s most spectacular lands.

Thomas Alma Moulton Barn (Grand Teton National Park) by Ken Lane, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

And once that selloff happens, the full value of the land is gone. The ecosystem services provided by an open-pit mine are close to zero, and often negative, since many mines pollute the surrounding air and water. The economic value of a gated community may or may not be larger than the economic value of the hunting, fishing, and recreation that happened on that land before the selloff, but if Americans have lost access to that land, then its value to the public is effectively zero.

A better way forward

From both an economic and environmental perspective, trying to build a sovereign wealth fund by selling public lands makes no sense. But alternate proposals abound. Several states have existing sovereign wealth funds, including New Mexico. New Mexico invests all of the fossil fuel royalties the state receives into a fund that was worth more than $25 billion in 2022. The state is on track to decouple the state budget from oil and gas revenue by 2029, clearing the way for New Mexico to transition away from fossil fuels and use the energy fund to provide predictable funding for schools and social services without having to worry about boom-and-bust cycles. The Center for American Progress suggests that a similar American sovereign wealth fund could be built using existing oil and gas royalties, and future mining royalties if Congress fixes the 1872 mining law. That form of fund would keep public lands in public hands while providing a stable financial future for communities that rely on resource extraction.

Oil wells outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico by Simon Foot, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Dasgupta review highlights a proposal in Costa Rica that would fund conservation and restoration of national parks by forming a publicly-traded asset valued by the park ecosystem itself. In 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a similar type of investment class, the Natural Asset Company, which would allow the public to invest in the full value of intact ecosystems. As the value of those ecosystem services grow, the value of the asset would grow as well. This sort of model would create financial incentives to ensure permanent and sustainable public access to public or private land, since recreation, hunting, and fishing would be fully measured as part of the services that intact ecosystems provide.

President Trump and Interior Secretary Burgum aren’t wrong when they say that public lands are incredible assets on America’s balance sheet. But proposals to pay down the national debt or create a sovereign wealth fund by selling American lands to oligarchs and leasing every possible acre for extraction aren’t just short-sighted and un-American — they’re terrible financial advice.

Zion National Park by Jeff Krause, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Of course, what’s missing from this accounting journey is the truly unquantifiable nature of public lands. Even when the numbers on a balance sheet fully reflect the economic impact of intact ecosystems, that still doesn’t capture the beauty, inspiration, and solace that every American can find on our public lands.

Just as a treasured family heirloom has a value far beyond what it would bring in at an estate sale, the legacy we leave future generations is more than dollars and cents — it’s the opportunity to explore and challenge ourselves, and the responsibility to pass our public lands on to their children and grandchildren. That’s an American value that transcends economics.

Featured image: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge/USFWS