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Floor Speech
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Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, I want to talk about two subjects today. First, I want to talk about assets. We have been talking a lot about spending and the Federal budget and tax dollars. But there is another side to the ledger that sooner or later, in my judgment, we need to talk about.
Here is what I am getting at: Twenty-five percent of the land in the United States of America is owned by the Federal Government--25 percent. In some States, it is a lot more than 25 percent. That is just an average. It is 620 million acres.
Now, if you inherited 620 million acres, what would you do? Well, the first thing you would do is you would be careful to conserve it out of respect for the land. You would want to make sure that the land wasn't contaminated; that it is properly fenced. You would want to preserve it.
Second thing you would do is say: Well, how can I monetize this property? I have 620 million acres here. I am land poor. What can I do to have the land generate some income?
Under our Federal Government, the Bureau of Land Management is responsible for managing the 620 million acres. And the charge to our Bureau is to do a couple of things: No. 1, conserve the land; No. 2, make sure--because it belongs to the American people--make sure that people have an opportunity to recreate on the land; and, No. 3, see if you can manage the land in a way to generate cash.
Why is that important? Why is that especially important right now? Our debt is $36.5 trillion. What does that mean? I mean, we throw around this figure of a trillion. We can hardly get our mind around it--at least, I can hardly get mine around it. Our debt is so high, and we are paying so much interest that the debt grows by $1 trillion every 100 days. So this $36.5 trillion figure, 100 days from now--a little over 3 months--it is going to be $37.5 trillion. That is how fast the debt is growing.
This number is so high and we are paying so much in interest that the debt accrues at $10 billion a day--not million--$10 billion a day; $417 million it goes up an hour; $6.9 million--let's call it $7 million a minute. How long have I been talking, 3 minutes? The debt just increased $21 million. And we have got to pay that money back. This is not funny money.
We are talking about how to start paying it back by reducing our spending. But there is another way; it is to generate income through our 620 million acres of land.
Take our national parks, for example. The first thing we want to do to our national parks is preserve them. I mean, they are beautiful. That is why they are national parks. We want to preserve them and respect them and protect them environmentally and otherwise. We also want to allow people to enjoy them.
We do that by telling folks: Come on in. You have to pay an entrance fee--but it is reasonable--if you want to come in and camp or just walk around and enjoy the scenery, go on a hike. That generates some money. You don't want the entrance fee to be too high, but you want it to be reasonable.
Some of our national parks actually allow mining, oil and gas production, and timber production, so that increases income as well.
I have seen an estimate from the private sector--there are several of these--that our public land, our 620 million acres, if we managed that land properly, could generate $90 million in revenue. So $90 million could be generated by our public land. How? Through a mineral harvesting, natural gas production, oil drilling, grazing for agriculture, hunting licenses, fishing licenses, and camping permits.
Do you know what? Our Federal lands actually generate money. We know the potential: $90 billion a year. That would help us pay down this debt.
In 2023, our Federal lands actually lost money. They lost $13 billion. We went from a potential of $90 billion--according to land-use experts, that is what they ought to be generating--to a loss of $13 billion. It is embarrassing.
I don't want to blame all of it on the past administration. It wasn't all President Biden's fault, but some of it was. Under President Biden--not him, but his people; he appointed them--they banned offshore drilling for most of America's coastlines. They prohibited mining on over a million acres of lands. They canceled leases for oil and natural gas production. They paused all new permits for LNG, which Europe is hungry for. They restricted hunting. They restricted fishing. They restricted hiking. And they buried our Federal lands in redtape. That is why we lost $13 billion instead of gaining $90 billion a year.
It doesn't have to be this way. All you have to do is look at the States. The States have State land. They don't have 620 million acres like the Federal Government does, but they have got a lot of land. The States have worked very hard to increase the revenue on their State lands while preserving them.
Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico--all we have to do is copy them. Their activities, their preservation of their property, but their monetizing of their State lands has produced, over the past few years, an average return of $14.51 for every $1 those States have invested. So the States spend $1 on their State land, they get back 15 bucks--pretty good return. They haven't sacrificed air quality. They protected their lakes and rivers, and they have preserved their State land.
The Federal Government, for every $1 we spend on our public land, we get back 73 cents. So we put out a buck, and we get back 73 cents. You don't have to be Euclid to see that we are going backward here. We need to do better.
I know that the focus right now is on spending--it should be--and it is on designing a Tax Code that looks like somebody designed it on purpose--and it should be. All those things are important. But at some point, we need to recognize the enormous amount of assets that the American people own through their Federal Government and the fact that we are actually losing money by the way we are managing them instead of generating money.
Once again, you don't have to be an astrophysicist to figure this out. All we have to do is call Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and probably West Virginia and just say: Would you all come up to Washington? We will buy you a soda and give you a nice hat if you will come on up here and tell us how you are doing it. And just copy what they are doing.
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