Federal Land Ownership and Management
Background and Current Issues
Today the Federal Government owns and manages roughly 640 million acres of land in the United States. Four major Federal land management agencies manage 610.1 million acres of this land, or about 95 percent of all Federal land in the United States. These agencies are as follows: Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 248.3 million acres; Forest Service (FS), 192.9 million acres; Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), 89.1 million acres; and National Park Service (NPS), 79.8 million acres. Most of these lands are in the West, including Alaska. In addition, the Department of Defense (DOD) administers 11.4 million acres in the United…
