Giving the West Away.

• Author: St. Clair, Jeffrey
• Position: Investigation into the administration of land exchange programs

Back in early days of Reagantime, Interior Secretary James Watt hatched a dark fantasy to sell off millions of acres of public forest and parklands to private corporations. When this scheme leaked out to the press, it was met with howls of derision, and Watt was vilified even by members of his own party.

Under the magic spell of the "winwin" solution, the Clinton Administration took that idea to heights undreamed of by Watt and his cronies. It began early on as a way to appease Republicans and tackle the federal debt, which had become an obsession of the bond market aficionados who were running economic policy in the Clinton White House.

In the past five years, more than 1.5 million acres have been traded away in hundreds of swaps. Another million acres in trades are awaiting completion. And some of the deals have been particularly lopsided.

At the request of Representative George Miller, the Democrat from California, the General Accounting Office (GAO) launched an investigation in 1999 of how the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service had been administering their land exchange programs. After reviewing hundreds of transactions, the GAO concluded that both programs were so corrupt that an immediate moratorium on the swaps should be put in place and that a Congressional investigation should be opened into improprieties committed by both agencies.

The GAO auditors found that most of the land exchanges favored private parties at the expense of the government and the environment. In many instances, the BLM and the Forest Service failed to demonstrate that any public interest would be served by the exchanges often. And the government often received impoverished land in exchange for top-notch habitat that would later be developed, clear-cut, or mined.

The BLM came in for particularly sharp criticism. The GAO investigators noted with amazement that the Bureau's accounting system didn't keep track of the value of the land exchanges, making it impossible to determine whether the deals were legal. But an analysis of some individual deals, especially in the state of Nevada, reveal the cozy relationship between agency land managers and private developers.

In one exchange--which was noted in the files but not identified--the BLM traded to a real estate broker seventy acres of private land valued by agency appraisers at $763,000. Later that same day, the broker sold the same tract to a Nevada developer for $4.6 million. That broker also made a killing on another BLM land swap. In this exchange, the broker acquired forty acres of public land from the BLM at a value of $504,000 and sold it the same day for $1 million.

These sweetheart deals are the rule, not the exception. The GAO called on the BLM to "immediately discontinue buying and selling land under its land exchange program and conduct an audit of financial records associated with the sales and purchases."

The Forest Service's record isn't any better. Over the past ten years, the agency has conducted more than 1,265 exchanges involving more than 950 square miles of land valued at more than $1 billion. But the GAO audit found that this was rarely a good deal for the government. "On...