Conservation groups say plan revives a selloff push from Trump’s first term
The Interior Department released a four-year strategic plan this week that would allow states, localities and tribes to purchase federal lands. The 28-page plan published Tuesday drew immediate criticism from public lands advocates in New Mexico and across the country, who called it another effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to initiate mass selloffs of public lands to private interests. Such proposals have met resistance before: waves of protests in New Mexico and across the country early in Trump’s first term contributed to lawmakers excising a similar proposal from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” Trump signed last July.
The Sierra Club joined the objection, pointing to an earlier public rejection of sell-off efforts. “After Americans across the political spectrum rejected efforts to sell off millions of acres of our shared lands, the Trump administration is once again pushing a dangerous agenda that puts our outdoors at risk,” said Loren Blackford, the executive director of the Sierra Club, in a statement Thursday.
Garrett Veneklasen, New Mexico Wild’s northern conservation director, told Source NM on Thursday that the strategic plan marks the first time the Trump administration has formally announced its intention to sell federal lands and that it demonstrates Interior Department Secretary Doug Burgum is still set on shuffling public lands off the federal government’s balance sheet. “Here we go again, right?” Veneklasen said. “This is their last-ditch effort. It’s like they’ve dusted this thing off and put new dressing on it.”
The plan does not specify which lands it might sell to states or tribes, but it outlines the sales in a section dedicated to reducing bureaucracy and improving collaboration with state, local and tribal governments. The same section also suggests the department intends to reduce its workforce to “advance operational efficiencies” and strengthen its focus to unspecified public lands of national importance. The department states its objective plainly: “The Department will work to decrease the size of the federal estate by offering to states, localities and Tribes the opportunity to purchase federal lands,” the plan reads. “Through these sales, the Department will be able to focus its resources on primary federal responsibilities and nationally significant federal lands.”
Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, told Source NM on Thursday that the plan’s language aims to deceive the public about the department’s real intent. “It doesn’t sound as egregious as it actually is, but transferring land to the state or selling land to the state or some other entity ultimately results in privatization,” he said. “These are lands that belong to the American people.”
Keegan King, founder and executive director of the Native Lands Institute, told Source NM on Thursday that the department’s plan “confirms a lot of our fears” about Trump’s public lands agenda. “This strategic plan is basically letting people know that the Department of the Interior is open for business. Our children’s inheritance, public lands, are being sold out from under us,” he said. “If this goes through and DOI changes its mission from stewarding our public lands to selling them off to the highest bidder, I’m not sure what we’ll have left.”
U.S. Interior Department officials did not respond to Source NM’s emailed request for further comment Thursday. The department released the plan a week after midterm elections in which Democrats won sizable majorities in both chambers of Congress. Veneklasen said those new majority Democrats — including all of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, whose five members have consistently opposed public lands sales — will be instrumental in preventing Trump’s administration from implementing its plan over the next four years.
On Capitol Hill, U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) is expected to become the next chair of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and, in a statement his office sent Thursday to Source NM, denounced the U.S. Interior Department’s plan. “These lands belong to the American people,” Heinrich said. “Public lands belong in public hands.”
Veneklasen also looked beyond elected officials. In addition to congressional Democrats, he predicted members of the recreating public — including hunters, anglers, hikers and others — will rise again in opposition. “We’ve got to do everything we can to fight it,” he said. “And I think that there will be an even bigger uprising, especially now that the blue wave has happened.”