Published by REALTOR.com | March 20, 2025
President Donald Trump's administration has taken the first step toward fulfilling his campaign promise of opening up some federal land to build new homes and boost the nation's housing supply.
Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner on Monday announced a new joint task force that will begin identifying federal land that is suitable for housing development.
Nationwide, the federal government owns about 1 million square miles of land, or about 27% of the country’s total land area. The new initiative will focus on the roughly 500 million acres managed by the Department of Interior, which oversees national parks and wildlife refuges.
“Our federal lands are an incredible asset on America’s balance sheet, and we’ve been discussing how we can efficiently and effectively steward these underutilized areas to solve our nation’s affordable housing crisis,” Burgum said in a video with Turner announcing the task force.
The partnership between Interior and HUD will identify underutilized federal lands suitable for residential development and streamline the land transfer process, Burgum said.
He added that it will also promote policies to increase the availability of affordable housing, while balancing important environmental and land use considerations.
The announcement follows a recent report from the Realtor.com® economic research team, which found that the country has a “housing supply gap” of at least 3.8 million units. At the current pace of construction, it would take more than seven years for supply to catch up with demand, the report found.
In a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Burgum and Turner said the interagency task force would work to reduce red tape associated with building on federal land and “cut through the bureaucracy” to spur new housing development.
“This isn’t a free-for-all to build on federal lands, although we recognize that bad-faith critics will likely call it that,” they wrote. “It’s a strategic effort to use our resources responsibly while preserving our most beautiful lands.
During the 2024 election, Trump touted the idea of opening up federal lands for residential development as a step toward easing the housing crisis.
While housing economists are generally supportive of measures aimed at boosting new home construction and increasing the housing supply, the use of federal land for such a purpose has some limitations.
