The Biden administration’s newest lands plan is bad news for Western states, and it will disproportionately hurt Nevada.
Nevada is one of the largest states in the country in terms of area. But it’s a much different story if you subtract land owned by the federal government. Washington controls more than 56 million of Nevada’s 70.3 million acres. That’s more than 80 percent of the state. All land data comes from a 2020 Congressional Research Service report.
That leaves Nevada with just more than 14 million acres available for private ownership and state and local governments. To visualize, that’s about 10 percent smaller than West Virginia, and the federal government owns less than 8 percent of that state. If you excluded land owned by the federal government, Nevada would fall from the seventh-largest state to the 10th smallest.
