Editorial: Why does Washington need more real estate?

It's a policy based on self-preservation for thousands of federal bureaucrats: Washington's vast real estate portfolio mustn't ever shrink. In other words, for every acre of land removed from federal control and placed in private hands, another acre somewhere else must be purchased and put under Washington hegemony. Otherwise, federal land agencies may eventually be unable to justify the massive herd of government agents now employed to oversee these holdings. This tenet has played out in Nevada for years, where the federal government controls some 86 percent of the state. Heaven forfend that should ever fall to, say, 80 percent, however. So whenever the Bureau of Land Management auctions off acreage in urban Southern Nevada, it uses some of the proceeds to buy "sensitive" lands elsewhere in the state...more