Today, the Subcommittee on Federal Lands held a legislative hearing on H.R. 2199 (Rep Cramer, R-ND), the “Federal Land Asset Inventory Reform Act of 2017” or the “FLAIR Act.”

The federal government owns an estimated 640 million acres of land, although, amazingly, the actual acreage number is not definitively known. The bipartisan FLAIR Act requires the Secretary of the Interior to develop and maintain a cadastre of Federal real property in a publicly available, graphically geo-enabled and searchable format.

“One of my great frustrations is the fact that although the federal government owns some 640 million acres of land it is such a bad landlord. [They don’t] take care of this land and can’t even provide a comprehensive list of its land holdings. GAO has warned for years of these forgotten and abandoned lands,” Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock (R-CA) said. “How can you manage land you don’t know or care that you even own?”

“‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure,’” MAPPS Executive Director John Palatiello stated. “The fact is the Federal government does not know what it owns, where it owns it, what condition it is in [or] whether it is still in the public interest for the government to own it.”

Starting in 2003, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) began listing federal real property management on its High Risk List due to the likelihood of “fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” and the need for reforms.

Despite the federal government's efforts to better address management and ownership challenges with federal lands, a 2016 GAO report found that a range of challenges in managing real property still exist due to a lack of reliable data, complex disposal processes and costly environmental requirements.

The FLAIR Act will improve transparency and promote greater efficiency and cost savings for federal land management and ownership.

Click here to view full witness testimony.