expanded the nation's protected forest by over . In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt created the United States Forest Service, naming Gifford Pinchot the first agency chief. Pinchot was put in charge of the forest reserves to manage them "for the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run". In support of this directive, Congress changed the jurisdiction of the reserves from the General Land Office in the Department of the Interior to the new Division of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture. Two years later in 1907, Congress renamed forest reserves to national forests through provisions of an agriculture appropriations bill. In addition, the provisions prohibited the creation or enlargement of national forests in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, except by act of Congress. After the bill's passage by Congress on February 25, Chief Forester Pinchot and his staff raced to identify an additional of forest in those states, which President Roosevelt designated as forest reserves prior to signing the act into law on March 4. In total, Roosevelt would quadruple the nation's forest reserves from to nearly . Legacy and impact on public policy From 1891 to 1900, over 50 million acres of land were withdrawn from private entities and added to the public domain following passage of the General Revision Act of 1891. Given the volume of land changing hands at this time, there was public debate over the scale of government purchasing activities of land. Specifically, the debate ranged between the privately held, expansionist and free market school of thought against a public oriented, protectionist and conservation camp. The argument for privatization is often cited alongside the growth of the railroad building activities, namely after the passage of the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. In this case, landowners could receive rent payments at a market driven price from the railroads anticipating western growth over privately held land plots. The induction of increased government held land is argued to reduce such rents and diminish the incentives for westward expansion. However, the protectionist argument sterns from the conservation of commodities such as timber, coal and phosphates. By arguing for the development of strategic reserves of such commodities, the protectionist view advocates the idea of delayed consumption best fitting the country's domestic demands. Initially section 24 caused substantial confusion as to what the law specifically was intended to allow. The main issue was that the act