GOP bill makes 14 million acres of public land in NM ‘eligible’ for sale, according to new analysis

BY: PATRICK LOHMANN
Courtesy of Source NM

Highway 9, with federal grazing land on either side, in Southern New Mexico pictured in May 2025. The Senate reconciliation bill making progress this week makes more than 250 million acres “eligible” for private sell-offs, including federal grazing land, according to an analysis by the Wilderness Society. The bill mandates up to 3.2 million acres of public land be disposed of. (Photo by Patrick Lohmann / Source NM)

The federal budget reconciliation bill making progress in the United States Senate this week makes more than 21,000 square miles of public land in New Mexico “eligible” to be sold to private buyers, according to the Wilderness Society.

The group, which opposes efforts to sell off public lands, geographically analyzed lands across the West that could be subject to a land sale, based on criteria laid out in the bill.

Across the West, several hundred million acres of land would meet the criteria, according to the group, though only a tiny fraction of that would be sold, per the bill text. The bill mandates the “disposal” of between .5% and .75% of all United States Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land across the West, which means up to 3.2 million acres or 5,000 square miles. 

​According to the Wilderness Society’s analysis, about 6.5 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land in New Mexico would be eligible, in addition to about 7.8 million acres of BLM land. According to a map the society created, huge swathes of BLM land east of Las Cruces also would be eligible, along with areas of the Gila National Forest and Santa Fe National Forest. 

This map visualizes the 250+ million acres of public lands eligible for sale in the Senate budget reconciliation package. Take action: Tell your senators to vote no on the reconciliation bill. Learn more about the bill and find the data here. Map and analysis by The Wilderness Society using source data from BLM, USFS, USGS, NPS, and SENR reconciliation bill text as of June 16th 2025.

The mandate does not apply to national parks, monuments or other “federally protected land” like historic sites, wildlife refuges or fish hatcheries. It also excludes land that is “subject to valid existing rights.” 

But it’s no longer clear what that last provision means, said Wilderness Society spokesperson Max Greenberg in an interview Tuesday with Source New Mexico. Until this weekend, “valid existing rights” applied to federal lands with grazing leases, but lawmakers struck the definition, according to Politico and leaked drafts the organization obtained.

After lawmakers removed that definition, the Wilderness Society revised its estimate to 250 million acres of federal land eligible for sale, up from 120 million acres, Greenberg said. The figure reflects the sheer amount of federal land now leased for grazing across the West, he said, and also the secrecy in the legislative process. 

“This played out with kind of secret updates over the weekend and this very non-transparent, strange process where we have to work out what is actually implicated in the bill,” Greenberg told Source. “All of this argues for just [a] better process and better transparency… It’s been misleading the way the bill was initially framed by Republicans as this kind of very surgical effort to dispose of a few marginal parcels here and there.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, has said the mandated selloff would serve as a way to discard remote and difficult-to-manage public lands and turn them into housing developments. He made the pitch last week in a video he released, featuring Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner.

“Washington has proven time and again that it can’t manage this land. This bill puts it in better hands,” Lee said in the video. 

A previous version of the bill in the House contained about half a million acres of specific parcels of federal land to lose federal protections, but House lawmakers removed that language after pushback, including from U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM). Vasquez called it a “huge victory” at the time.