Wasted Potential of Federal Lands

Among Western, market-based democracies, can you guess which government owns the most land? The United Kingdom? No, the central government there owns about 5.3% of the land area. What about Germany? There the central government owns about 3% of its forests and agricultural land is private. The winner by far is America, where the federal government owns and manages 28% of the land across all fifty states. It is an immense holding of 610 million acres, four times the size of France. Most of it is managed by two agencies, the U.S. Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture (38,627 employees and a budget of over $7 billion) and the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior (10,196 employees and a budget of over $2 billion). The National Park Service administers a comparatively small, 27.4 million acres. What is the reason for this huge federal estate and what does it mean for today?