H.R. 3903: Chugach Alaska Land Exchange Oil Spill Recovery Act of 2025

H.R. 3903 sets up a straight swap. If Chugach Alaska offers to hand over all of its rights to roughly 231,000 acres of subsurface land, the Interior Department must accept and, in return, convey about 65,374 acres of federal land in the Chugach region to the corporation. The whole exchange has to happen within one year of the bill becoming law.

The point is to fix a split-estate problem. In many spots, the United States or the State of Alaska owns the surface — bought to protect habitat after Exxon Valdez — while Chugach owns the minerals and everything else below ground. Two owners stacked on the same piece of land makes conservation management messy. The bill lets the federal government bring the surface and subsurface under one owner, and gives Chugach cleaner parcels it can use without a federal landlord above it.

This isn't a free-form trade. The specific parcels come from the Chugach Region Land Study Report that Congress ordered in the 2019 Dingell Act. The federal land going to Chugach includes Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service parcels — places like Drier Bay, Snow River, and Hinchinbrook Island. Existing easements, rights-of-way, and third-party rights stay in place, and the bill carves out up to 209 acres where a village corporation kept development rights or land is set aside for shareholder homesites.

The Interior Department backed the bill's intent in congressional testimony while flagging technical concerns about parcels that weren't in the original land study. Supporters frame it as finishing unfinished business from the spill recovery era. The open questions, as with any federal land transfer, are whether the acreage trades fairly on both sides and how public access plays out parcel by parcel.