NM U.S. Rep. Vasquez introduces bill to prevent ‘last-minute, backdoor deals’ to sell public lands

U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) introduced a bipartisan bill Friday that would prevent members of Congress from including public land selloffs in unrelated budget bills, a tactic that congressional Republicans unsuccessfully used last year to try to dispose of thousands of acres of federal land in Utah and Nevada. 

The Public Lands Integrity Act would require that any effort to permanently sell or transfer public land receives “full congressional consideration,” according to a statement from Vasquez’s office, including requiring 60 votes in the U.S. Senate instead of just a simple majority of 51.

“Treating public lands as another item on a balance sheet goes against the will of the people, and Americans have made it clear that our public lands are not for sale,” Vasquez said in a statement Friday.

An early provision in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a sweeping budget reconciliation bill that Congress enacted last year, would have allowed the privatization of roughly 500,000 acres of public land, including swathes earlier designated by Congress for conservation. 

That provision — which U.S. Reps. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) and Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) sponsored — was ultimately stripped from the final bill before it made it to the House floor. Vasquez, a co-founder of a bipartisan Public Lands Caucus in the House, hailed the provision’s removal as “a huge victory.”

But Vasquez’s bill aims to prevent Republicans from trying again to use a budget reconciliation bill — which often runs thousands of pages long and requires only a majority vote — for renewed efforts at public land selloffs.

The bill would “ensure these lands are held in trust for future generations and won’t be used in the reconciliation process in last-minute, backdoor deals to sell them off,” he said. 

U.S. Reps Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) and Dina Titus (D-Nevada) are cosponsoring the bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) is sponsoring it in the U.S. Senate. Two dozen environmental groups, including local groups like New Mexico Wild and Nuestra Tierra Conservation Project, endorsed the bill. 

“Our shared public lands are too important and too beloved by citizens of all political stripes to be sold off,” New Mexico Wild Conservation Director Bjorn Fredrickson said in a statement. “And I suspect that any politician seeking to do so will think twice if they must be transparent, for fear of the wrath of their voters at the ballot box.”