With President Bush's signature of the $388 billion budget, CNN seems to lament the fact that the budget for National Parks focuses on operating expenses and not land acquisition:

The Interior Department will get $9.9 billion, nearly $100 million less than Bush wanted and 0.4 percent more than 2004. National parks operating money goes up 6 percent, but money for buying park lands remains nearly two-thirds below the peak of three years ago.

But given that federal lands are already mismanaged and falling into disrepair, it seems obvious that operating expenses are where money should be spent. If you can't manage what you already have, why would you go out and purchase more land to mismanage?

As I noted, in an earlier post, with Bush's signature of the budget bill, much of this mismanagement may turn around with the bill's extension of the Fee Demonstration Program for ten more years. This program provides incentives for proper management that is already leading to better caretaking of the federal estate. Fee Demo may also get the ball rolling for a day when the Park Service, Forest Service, and other land agencies consider selling off lands that are marginal to their mission in order to have more funds for purchasing or managing lands that are more critical to their mission --- whatever that mission may be.

While selling federal lands (partially or wholesale) is probably far off in the future, opportunities for expanded land swaps between federal land agencies and private landowners to deal with the checkerboard land ownership of the western United States might not be so far off. People in the Bush Administration have bandied such an idea about as a possibility for the next four years -- reducing federal land ownership through transfers that, at the same time, increase the quality of federal land ownership for habitat and stewardship purposes through the creation of more contiguous blocks of habitat.

Such a plan will be a lot more difficult for opponents to criticize than the outright privatization advocated by James Watt in the Reagan Administration, which failed so miserably to transfer any of the federal estate to the private sector. The benefits to both stewardship and wise resource use would create winners all around as lands are given a better opportunity to migrate to their best use whether as lands for consumption, conservation, or more accurately (given that in many ways conservation is a type of consumption), as both. Still, I won't be surprised to see such a plan attacked as anti-environmental by some sectors, but this will be a more difficult sell for opponents than labeling the Watt plan as anti-environmental was.