As Congressional lawmakers sought to pay for tax cuts over the past few weeks, they turned their eyes to the vast swaths of mountains, foothills and high plains across the Mountain West owned by the federal government and saw a piggy bank.
Lawmakers on Wednesday ultimately removed from the Republican budget bill a provision that would have sold more than 500,000 acres of federal public land in Utah and Nevada, but public lands advocates worry the struggle to stop other sales of land owned by the federal government has only begun.
“The idea that we’re going to pay for tax cuts by selling public lands sets a really bad precedent,” said Jamie Ervin, senior policy manager with Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of outdoor recreation organizations, including Colorado-based American Alpine Club and the Colorado Mountain Club.
Public lands advocates said the addition of the land sales via a late-night amendment while the budget bill was in committee could open the door for sales in other Western states like Colorado, where a third of the land is owned and managed by federal agencies.
It could set a precedent for embedding public lands sales in larger legislation and shielding the provision from more robust public input and debate, said Michael Carroll, Bureau of Land Management campaign director for The Wilderness Society. Budget bills do not get the same level of scrutiny that a standalone bill does, he said.
“The next time that there is a member of Congress who has a buddy in the development business, they could introduce and get embedded in the next budget bill the sale of public lands around Rocky Mountain National Park or some of the other marquee landscapes across the state,” Carroll said. “Once you sell off public lands, you can’t get them back.”
The majority of federal public land in Colorado is managed by three agencies: 16 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, 8.3 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and about 456,000 acres managed by the National Park Service. The lands include iconic landscapes such as the Maroon Bells, Rocky Mountain National Park and the Browns Canyon National Monument.
Less than a quarter of voters in the Rocky Mountain West support selling federal public lands for housing, according to a 2025 survey of 3,316 voters across eight Rocky Mountain states conducted by Colorado College. In Colorado, only 10% of survey respondents supported the idea. Nearly 90% of survey respondents visited federal public lands at least once a year, the survey found.
Despite broad support for public lands and the removal of the sale from the budget bill, the concept of selling land is not off the table yet, said Hannah Stevens, executive director of the Western Slope Conservation Center, a nonprofit conservation group based in the North Fork Valley.
“That was probably the first real legislative threat,” she said.
The public lands sale provision highlighted different levels of support for the sale of public lands among the West’s Republican representatives.
Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction attorney, was elected in November to represent Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District, which covers western and southern Colorado. More than half of the district is federal public land.
In a May 6 House Committee on Natural Resources meeting, Hurd voted against the amendment to sell the public land in Nevada and Utah — the only Republican to break from his party and oppose it. Two other Colorado representatives on the committee — Reps. Lauren Boebert and Jeff Crank — voted in favor of the public lands sale.
Hurd then, however, voted in favor of the entire package, which included the amendment he opposed. He opposed the sale but said in an interview Thursday that his concerns did not outweigh the parts of the bill he liked.
“I was the only Republican who voted against it because, on principal, I thought it was not a good thing, but it was part of an overall bill that advanced the agenda I ran on,” he said.
Rep. Joe Neguse, the only Colorado Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, opposed the public lands sale and blasted Republicans for adding it to the bill late at night in the middle of the markup process and without the chance for meaningful debate or public input.
“While I am proud to see our efforts result in the removal of Republicans’ plan to sell off treasured public lands in Nevada and Utah, I continue to be deeply concerned for the sweeping threats this bill still poses to critical conservation and public oversight programs,” Neguse said in a statement Thursday.
Other Western Republicans have vocally opposed the sale of public lands. Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana — a Republican who served as secretary of the interior during Trump’s first term — said he would not support the budget bill with the sell-off provision included and introduced a bill that would ban the sale or transfer of most federal public lands. Other Western Republicans have signed on in support of the Public Lands in Public Hands Act, including Idaho’s Rep. Mike Simpson and Montana’s Rep. Troy Downing.
Hurd, like other Colorado Republicans, voted early Thursday in favor of the budget bill and would have still voted in favor of the wide-ranging policy and spending legislation even if it had included the public lands sale, he said.
“I would’ve voted for this bill even if this land sale provision had been included simply because we can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” Hurd said.
Hurd said he opposes large-scale public land sell-offs, especially when they’re proposed by “Washington bureaucrats that don’t have a connection to the lands or the people who live near it.”
“Federal lands belong to the American people, including the people of southern and western Colorado who I represent, and I think any change in land ownership needs to reflect local needs and not ideological agendas.”
Public lands advocates fear the narrowly avoided sale is the first of other attempts to sell federal land or transfer it to states — a topic that has divided the West for decades.
“This battle is far from over, and we will continue to be vigilant and fight for our wild public lands and waters now and for future generations,” LD Delano, board chair for Durango-based Great Old Broads for Wilderness, said in a statement.
Sales of public lands are a threat to the communities and businesses that rely on them, said Sarah Shrader, founder and chair of the Grand Valley Outdoor Recreation Coalition, an economic development group for the outdoor recreation industry in western Colorado. Nearly three-quarters of Mesa County is public lands and the access to those lands help draw people to live, work and play in the area, she said.
“Taking public lands out of public hands, we’re also talking about stripping our economy,” she said. “You’re taking away the essential reason people live here.”
Residents across the Grand Valley, regardless of political affiliation, believe in keeping public lands, she said.
“For rural communities like ours, public lands are not just an idea,” she said. “They’re our livelihoods — this is what powers our economy.”
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