It belongs to the federal government, but the federal government should have sold it long ago.
I don't see how giving state governments millions of acres of land for free helps anything.
Once a state was admitted to the union, the Feds were to sell, offer as homesteads, and otherwise privatize the land, so that the people benefited. Any revenue raised could thus be used to pay Federal debts/contracts.
The current Federal “ownership” is unconstitutional. The Feds tried this with Missouri and several other states, but the states banded together and were successful in forcing the Feds to divest.
I do. Opening land within states to new settlement will facilitate the transfer of the balance of power from the North to the West.
Following the Civil War, the Yankees were able to subjugate the South with repressive carpetbagger policies. Opening the West created a huge problem in the eyes of the Yanks because undoubtedly the power would shift to the West and carpetbagger policies wouldn't work in the West.
The Yanks tried to deal with this conundrum in several ways. Confederate soldiers were prohibited from applying to Homestead; only Union soldiers and immigrants were allowed, since they would be loyal to the North (wash dc). The effect of scarce land for development into housing and towns discouraged wide-spread settlement of a state, as did restrictions of infrastructure to designated population centers (i.e., around forts) which were widely dispersed. Widely dispersed populations are powerless.
The North tried to ensure that the western states would have little political influence going forward, leaving control of policy permanently in the hands of the North. Were the western states allowed to be more populous from the start, the shift of power would most have certainly have moved towards western values. The northern states would likely have fallen into the same insignificance the Union subjected the South to. Of course, the industrialist Union, riding high on the horse after the complete destruction of the agricultural South(which, btw, followed 30 years of the wholesale exporting of slaves from the North to the South), would have nothing of that! And so growth was intentionally limited in the Western states by restricting available land, and therefore, voting population, as a means of maintaining political control of Washington DC.
It's high time the North was reined in and western states, relegated for 150 years to the status of second-class citizens, are given the right to finally settle on land in their own states. If it means the loss of the North's political control, then so be it; it's been a long darn time coming.