WASHINGTON - Senators from both parties on Tuesday challenged a Bush administration plan to sell more than 300,000 acres of national forest to help pay for rural schools in 41 states.

Lawmakers said the short-term gains would be offset by the permanent loss of public lands. They also said profits from the proposed sales would fall far short of what's needed to help rural governments pay for schools and other basic services.

“I just don't think we can play Russian roulette with these local communities,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who vowed to “do everything I can” to stop the plan.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, had a more visceral reaction: “No, heck no,” he told Bush administration officials at a Senate hearing Tuesday.

Wyden and Craig were co-sponsors of a 2000 law that has pumped more than $2 billion into rural counties hurt by logging cutbacks on federal land. The so-called “county payments” law has helped offset sharp declines in timber sales in Oregon and other Western states in the wake of federal forest policy that restricts logging to protect endangered species such as the spotted owl.

The law is set to expire Sept. 30. The land-sale plan would reauthorize the law for five years, but calls for a phased reduction in funding to zero by 2011.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who directs U.S. forest policy, called the proposed cutbacks painful but necessary. The law was never intended to be permanent, he said, but was a way to help rural counties make the transition from dependence on timber receipts to a more broad-based economy.

The lands proposed for sale are all isolated; difficult or expensive to manage; and no longer meet Forest Service needs, Rey said.

The proposal, which was published Tuesday in the Federal Register, would give states, counties and land trusts the first chance to buy Forest Service land offered for sale, Rey said. Remaining parcels would then be sold to the highest bidder.

“We think this is justified as a one-time transition to help rural schools” for five more years before eliminating the program entirely, Rey told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Asked what rural counties in Oregon, Idaho and other states should expect, Rey was blunt: Counties that have diversified their economies and local budgets in recent years should be fine, he said.

Those that have not “are facing rather dramatic and immediate reductions in their school budgets,” Rey said.

Rey's comments met with bipartisan derision.

“County payments are an extremely important funding source for counties with forest land inside their boundaries,” said Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo. “To propose selling off public lands we will lose forever, in exchange for a program we can pay for by other more prudent means, is simply irresponsible.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said the administration “wants to eliminate a proven, balanced initiative in favor of a public lands fire sale. Washington's rural communities need our support and want the county payments program extended.”

Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., said he was not opposed to the land sale in principle, but was concerned about how much revenue would go to Missouri schools. The Bush plan would sell 21,566 acres in Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest - the third-largest land sale in the country - but would result in a likely cut in funding for Missouri schools.

“Our schools need the money,” Talent told Rey and Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. “We view the Mark Twain as a national treasure and a Missouri treasure.”

Rey acknowledged the disparity, but said funding formulas could be adjusted as Congress sees fit. Oregon and other Western states get the lion's share of the money under the current program.

Wyden, who called reauthorization of the law his top priority for the year, said the proposed land sale had another, practical problem for local governments: Many of the sales are likely to be contested in court, meaning revenue from the sale could be delayed for months or years. “This is a lawyers' full-employment program,” Wyden told Rey.

More importantly, Wyden said, the plan puts the county payments program “back into the ideological briar patch,” where the timber industry and developers interested in acquiring public lands are pitted against environmentalists who want to stop them.

“That's what Sen. Craig and I tried to avoid in 2000,” Wyden said. “Literally, all over the country, people who were battling each other are now cooperating.”

Wyden and Craig cited a new study by the California-based Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, which concludes that advisory committees created by the law have fostered cooperation and consensus. No project developed by the so-called Resource Advisory Committees has been appealed to a federal agency or challenged in court, the report said.

Under questioning from Wyden and Craig, Rey said the administration was open to abandoning the land sales - if spending cuts in other areas are made to offset the cost of the rural schools program.

Asked later if he was challenging senators to find money for the program in the budget, Rey said no.

“If they don't like (the land sale idea), they are challenging themselves,” he said. “We have to find a way to pay for it.”