The great land rush of 2025

Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote
We now know which public lands in New Mexico that Congressional Republicans might sell, and it’s quite a list — 61 properties in 20 counties. Authors of the budget reconciliation bill have been secretive, but Sen. Martin Heinrich recently extracted some specifics.
Heinrich, a Democrat who is the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, released the list on June 18, saying the bill mandates the unprecedented sale of two to three million acres.
We’ve been having this public lands debate for years. Sometimes discussion swings to the left, sometimes to the right, but it’s never resolved.
In 2012 Utah’s governor demanded that 20 million acres of federal land be transferred to his state. A few other western states (but not New Mexico) looked into it. The argument was that states could better manage these lands than federal agencies.
The reality? States have nowhere near the personnel and funding to take this on and would have to sell or lease some land to finance management of what remained. In 2014 Heinrich, then the state’s junior senator, predicted that states would sell the best, most desirable lands and “taxpayers would be saddled with the costs of overseeing the rest.” And the public would find more locked gates and the end of access to prized hunting, fishing and hiking areas.
Others observed that state ownership could backfire, as states raised fees for grazing and recreation and jacked up royalties for mining and energy development.
However, Paul Gessing, of the conservative Rio Grande Foundation, countered that in the previous two years the federal government, with only a signature by President Obama, had placed more than 783,000 acres of New Mexico land in two monuments – the Rio Grande del Norte and Organ Mountain.
President Trump during his first term tried to shrink some national monuments, including those two, provoking an outcry in Las Cruces and northern New Mexico.
“After many protests and photos of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on horseback, what happened is: Not much,” I wrote in 2017. “The blowback was hotter than Zinke and the administration anticipated; public comments, overwhelmingly in support, topped 2.3 million.”
In 2022, during the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon fire, the right-wing ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) renewed the push for state ownership, arguing in the Albuquerque Journal that federal land managers had been poor stewards, and millions of acres were at high risk for wildfire. A northern New Mexico landowner wrote in response that the Virginia-based group should butt out of New Mexico land policy.
The poor-stewardship argument is an old one. A representative of Trout Unlimited has argued that the same people demanding state ownership have for years cut funding to land agencies, making it impossible for them to do necessary preventive maintenance.
In 2022, the governor joined a Biden administration initiative to conserve 30% of lands and waters by 2030. But 15 counties hollered “land grab” and passed resolutions in opposition. Never fear. The so-called 30×30 initiative morphed into a committee embedded in state bureaucracy and likely won’t be heard from again.
Now we’re looking at the sale of public lands.
In the House, our own Rep. Gabe Vasquez joined with former Interior Secretary and now Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana to found the Bipartisan Public Lands Caucus. They removed language from the bill that would have placed a half million acres on the block.
The Senate version, however, would unload up to 3.3 million acres of public lands; an amendment adds a whopping 258 million acres in the next five years, according to outdoor journalist Wes Siler. And the process sounds something like the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 with no hearings, no debate, no public input.
In New Mexico, about 6.5 million acres of U.S. Forest Service land and 7.8 million acres of BLM land could be eligible for sale. This doesn’t include national parks, monuments, historic sites, wildlife refuges or fish hatcheries, according to Source New Mexico.
How about grazing land? Nobody knows, and the bill’s authors aren’t saying.
If this bill is so good for us, why can’t its sponsors roll it out of the garage and let us kick the tires? What we don’t know is as scary as what we do know. It amounts to a big experiment.
So I have a modest proposal. Utah wants to sell federal land within its borders. Why not let them? They can be a pilot project for federal land sales, and we can see how it works out.
Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.