The Washington Post discusses an effort by a Maine philanthropist to donate 88,000 acres of land to the National Park Service (NPS). Showing good sense, Mainers are pushing back against the idea:

The recent “occupation” of government-owned lands in Eastern Oregon by disgruntled ranchers’ motivated Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times (NYT) to produce an edifying essay on January 6th. It was aptly titled “Why the Government Owns So Much Land in the West.” Curiously, the NYT essay fails to mention one of the most significant, recent, and contentious attempts to “dispose” of federal public lands.

The federal government owns more than one quarter of the land in the nation, about 640 million acres. The holdings are concentrated in the West, where it owns about half of the 11 westernmost states.

Greece is expected to default on its government debts tomorrow as its bailout package from the European Union (EU) expires. The country will also hold a referendum on Friday on whether to accept the latest round of terms from its EU funders. Greece continues to grab all the headlines, but there is another government closer to home that is in a similar situation: Puerto Rico. Over the weekend, the governor of the island announced that Puerto Rico is unable to repay its $70 billion in debt.

Since treaties in the 19th century, the federal government has provided educational aid to American Indians. These days, the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) owns about 180 Indian schools, which have about 41,000 students in Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota, North Dakota, and other states.

Today is Tax Day. Federal tax returns are due to the Internal Revenue Service with a postmark before midnight. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the federal government will collect $3.2 trillion in revenue this year.

As research for this essay on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). I found virtually no information useful for my project.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stanford economics professor Edward Lazear provides an economist’s view of the California drought situation:

The battle between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) might be viewed as an overly aggressive federal bureaucracy enforcing misguided environmental regulations vs. an oppressed individual and his overly enthusiastic supporters with guns.

The movement to rid sports teams of Indian-themed names has picked up steam in recent years. In Washington D.C., activists have long pressured the Redskins to find a new name, but so far football team owner Dan Snyder is not budging.