Sponsors
The bill prioritizes preventing transfers of federal property to adversary-controlled entities and keeps property-management functions running during shutdowns by using sale proceeds, but it risks removing public assets, reducing employee back-pay protections, constraining disposal flexibility, and creating administrative, diplomatic, and tribal-sovereignty concerns.
Federal property is kept out of direct control by adversary states (China, Russia, North Korea, Iran), reducing risks that strategically important land or facilities could be used against U.S. interests.
Creates a clear, across-the-board prohibition on sales to listed adversary-controlled actors, simplifying agency and Presidential decisionmaking and reducing legal ambiguity in real property transactions.
Allows excepted federal employees who handle property sales to be paid during funding lapses using sale proceeds, keeping essential property-management operations and related services running during shutdowns.
Selling federal real property during shutdowns could permanently remove public assets and limit future public use or services, harming communities that rely on those properties.
Employees paid from sale proceeds during a lapse are excluded from receiving back pay under standard shutdown rules, potentially causing financial harm to those workers compared with normal back-pay protections.
The restriction on sales to certain foreign-controlled entities limits Presidential and agency flexibility to dispose of surplus property, which could reduce sale proceeds or delay transactions and complicate asset management.
Based on analysis of 3 sections of legislative text.
Authorizes the President, during any partial or full lapse in executive-branch appropriations, to sell Federal real property and use the proceeds to pay salaries and expenses of Federal officers and employees who are excepted from furlough. It treats services tied to those sales as emergency services for excepted-pay purposes, bars recipients of such pay from receiving back pay for the lapse, requires post-lapse proceeds to be deposited to the Treasury for deficit reduction (with an odd stated allowance for purchase of Greenland), and excludes Indian trust lands from eligible property. It also absolutely prohibits selling Federal real property to North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, or entities substantially controlled by them.
Introduced November 12, 2025 by Eric Burlison · Last progress November 12, 2025