The Acreage Audit

The problem

The United States is the largest landowner in the United States. Four agencies manage about 640 million acres, roughly 28 percent of the country's land, and the government owns the mineral rights beneath much of it and the outer continental shelf beyond it. Nobody knows what it is worth. The government's own financial statements do not say, and by rule they are not allowed to try: federal accounting standards classify about 97 percent of federal land as stewardship land, which is expensed when acquired and never carried as an asset. The newest standard, effective in fiscal 2026, requires agencies to disclose acreage. Acres, not dollars. The country's largest asset appears on its balance sheet as a footnote listing its size.

№ 050 pointed out that the federal government's auditor has refused to certify its financial report every year since 1997. The land is a large part of why: an entity that cannot say what it owns cannot produce a balance sheet, and an entity without a balance sheet cannot tell whether it is being paid properly for the use of its property. It is not. Federal grazing land rents for $1.35 per animal-month while private land beside it rents for over $23. Hardrock minerals under № 037 pay no royalty at all. Landing slots at three airports, orbits, spectrum, and fisheries are handed out on terms set decades ago, because there is no rent book against which anyone could see the shortfall.

This catalog is about to spend ten proposals on that rent book, from grazing to the seabed. Every one of them depends on a count that has never been made. The audit comes first.

The proposal

The Acreage Audit: a complete inventory of federal real property, every parcel, its use, its lessee, what it earns and what comparable property earns, and an estimate of its market value by class, published as the property schedule of the Shareholder's Report. Nothing is sold, transferred or rezoned by the audit. It is a count. Its purpose is to make the rent visible.

How it would work

1. Every parcel, one record. The Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration each keep their own inventories, in their own formats, to their own standards. The audit builds one register: location, acreage, agency, statutory designation, current use, every lease or permit on it, and the revenue each produced last year.

1. The rent, side by side. For every parcel that earns money, the register shows what it earned and what comparable private property earned for the same use in the same county, from the Agriculture Department's own surveys and the state's own lease records. The grazing allotment, the timber sale, the oil lease, the ski resort permit, the cell tower on the ridge: each with its rent and the market's, on one line.

1. Value by class, honestly. Not every acre has a market price, and the audit does not pretend otherwise. Land is valued in classes: commercial and leased land at market comparables; timber and mineral land at the present value of sustainable yield; wilderness, parks and refuges at acquisition cost with an explicit note that their value is not financial and is not for sale. The point is not a single number. It is that the parts with a price get one.

1. Buildings too. The government owns or leases hundreds of millions of square feet of offices, much of it, by the Government Accountability Office's account, largely empty since 2020. The audit counts the space, the occupancy and the cost per occupied desk, building by building.

1. On the balance sheet. The audited schedule becomes the property section of № 050's Shareholder's Report and the basis for the land's entry in the government's financial statements, with a standing request to the accounting board to permit valuation of the classes that have a market. The auditor's refusal to certify has to be answered somewhere. This is the first place.

1. Nothing sold. The audit authorises no disposal. Every acre this catalog has argued should be kept, the permanent estate of № 001 and № 009, is kept. An audit is not a prospectus. It is the thing a shareholder is owed before anyone proposes a sale, and the thing that lets a shareholder oppose one with numbers.

The numbers

What it earns now. Federal natural-resource revenue, oil, gas, coal and minerals on federal land and water, runs on the order of $15 to $20 billion a year, disbursed to the Treasury, the states and a handful of funds. Grazing brings in about $13 million against more than $100 million spent administering it. Timber, recreation permits and rights-of-way add smaller sums. Nobody publishes the total against a market comparable, and the audit's first output is that comparison.

What it might be worth. Independent estimates of the market value of federal surface land run from several hundred billion to a few trillion dollars depending on what is included, and the mineral estate has been valued at figures from the tens of trillions downward by parties with an interest in the answer. The honest statement is that no official number exists. The audit produces one, by class, with the assumptions shown.

What the audit costs. A national inventory and valuation of this size is on the order of $200 to $300 million over three years, and perhaps $50 million a year to maintain. Against an estate worth at least a trillion dollars, that is a management fee of a few hundredths of one percent, and it is less than the annual shortfall on grazing alone.

The honest objections

"An audit is the first step to selling the land." It is also the first step to defending it, and today there is no second step available to either side, because nobody can say what is at stake. Item 6 sells nothing and this catalog's position on the permanent estate is that it stays permanent. What an audit changes is that the next proposal to sell a parcel will have to argue against a published value, and the next proposal to rent one for $1.35 will have to explain the $23 beside it.

"You cannot put a price on a wilderness." Correct, and item 3 does not. It records the acquisition cost and states that the value is not financial. What it refuses to do is let the parts of the estate that plainly have a price, the ski resort, the oil lease, the office tower, hide behind the parts that do not.

"Agencies have inventories already, and another register is bureaucracy." They have six inventories that do not agree, in formats that do not join, none of which records the market rent beside the actual one. The Government Accountability Office has kept federal real property on its high-risk list since 2003 for precisely this reason. One register with one standard is less bureaucracy, not more.

"Congress ignores reports." It ignores the ones nobody reads. This one is a page in the Shareholder's Report that every citizen receives under № 050, and it says, in a table, that the public's land is rented for a twentieth of what the neighbour's is. That is not a report. It is a bill.

"The accounting board decided land should not be valued, for good reasons." It decided that the diversity of federal land made a single financial number misleading, which is true, and chose acreage disclosure as the alternative, which is a start. The audit accepts the reasoning and goes one step further: value by class, with the non-financial classes marked as such. That is what a private landowner with a national park in the portfolio would do.

Sources

• Congressional Research Service, Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data (R42346), acreage by agency
• Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, SFFAS 59: Accounting and Reporting of Government Land, and the treatment of stewardship land under prior standards
• U.S. Government Accountability Office, Managing Federal Lands and Waters and Federal Real Property high-risk area, gao.gov; GAO reports on federal office building utilisation since 2020
• U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Natural Resources Revenue, annual disbursements
• Bureau of Land Management, 2025 grazing fee notice; Congressional Research Service, Grazing Fees: Overview and Issues (RS21232); Taxpayers for Common Sense, Fiscal Costs of Federal Public Lands Livestock Grazing
• U.S. Department of the Treasury, Financial Report of the United States Government, and the Government Accountability Office's audit opinion
• Proposals № 001 (The American Dividend); № 009 (The Permanent Fund Compact); № 037 (The Hardrock Royalty); № 050 (The Shareholder's Report); № 073 (The Grazing Rent, forthcoming)