The agency that inherited America's leftover land now oversees an eighth of it
Its holdings were once dismissed as land nobody wanted, the ground homesteaders passed over. Today the Bureau of Land Management looks after more than 247.3 million acres, about one-eighth of the United States, plus nearly 700 million acres of minerals lying under other people's land.
The story starts right after independence. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 handed the young republic vast territory, states gave up their claims in what is now Ohio, and the government, short of money, decided to sell land. Two laws, the Land Ordinance of 1785 and, two years later, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, laid down how it would be surveyed and settled. Surveyors in Ohio learned by trial and error, producing the grid-based public land survey system, and in 1812 Congress set up the General Land Office inside the Treasury to handle sales.
For a century the job was giving land away. Patents were issued for cash sales, military bounty warrants, homesteads, railroads, town sites and even swamps, through local land offices scattered across the territories. The Homestead Act of 1862 often separated surface rights from what lay below, which is why the federal government still holds mineral rights under private and state land. In the 20th century the emphasis shifted: the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 allowed leasing for coal, oil, gas and sodium, and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 created a Grazing Service to manage rangeland.
In 1946, under President Truman, Congress merged the General Land Office and the Grazing Service into the Bureau of Land Management within the Interior Department. Over time it turned from disposing of land to managing it for the long run, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 declared that the remaining public lands would stay in public hands, managed for multiple uses.
That breadth makes the work a balancing act. Most of its land lies in 12 western states. Ranchers hold nearly 18,000 grazing permits and leases covering 155 million acres, while the bureau also manages 263 wilderness areas and 31 national monuments, the first being Grand Staircase-Escalante in southern Utah in 1996. Its headquarters has moved too: shifted to Grand Junction, Colorado, in August 2020 and back to Washington, D.C. under a decision announced in September 2021.
Source: Bureau of Land Management
