And that wording is in which clause of the Constitution?
CRS Report for Congress>
https://opencrs.com/document/RL34267/2007-12-03/download/1005/
“Federal Land Ownership: Constitutional Authority and the History of Acquisition, Disposal, and Retention”
December 3, 2007
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The Equal Footing Doctrine.
The equal footing doctrine is based on ArticleIV, § 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution.
That clause addresses how new states will be admitted. The doctrine means that “equality of constitutional right and power is the condition of all States of the Union, old and new. It does not mean that physicalor economic situations among states must be the same. The term comes from state enabling acts that included the phrase that the state was admitted “into the Union on an equal Footing with the original States. The U.S. Supreme Court has clarified what those rights are. In the context of land, the equal footing doctrine has been held to mean that states have the authority over the beds of navigable waterways. Some have argued that the equal footing doctrine prohibits permanent federal land ownership. This is contrary to the plain wording of the Constitution. The doctrine and some language within the U.S. Supreme Court case of Pollard’s Lessee v. Hagan11 have been combined to provide an argument that the federal government held the lands ceded by the original states only temporarily pending their disposal. However, this theory has been rejected by other Supreme Court cases. Furthermore, in Pollard’s Lessee v. Hagan, the Supreme Court ruled on the narrow issue of federal ownership of submerged lands beneath navigable waterways, finding those lands belonged to the state under the equal footing doctrine because the original states had kept ownership of the shores of navigable waters and the soils under them.
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Constitution says Congress controls ownership and dispersal of Federal land. It does not say some agency like BLM does it. This is where the rub comes in.