Panel puts spotlight on Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, BLM Director Steve Pearce, and anti-park members of Congress
SANTA FE— Leaders from New Mexico advocacy groups and the Center for Western Priorities called on President Donald Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and former New Mexico congressman and current Bureau of Land Management director Steve Pearce to stop attacking New Mexico’s parks and public lands.
At a live taping of The Landscape podcast, the Center for Western Priorities’ Keep Parks Public campaign highlighted the ongoing threats to American public lands, including the Trump administration’s aggressive attempts to lease public land for oil and gas drilling, funding cuts to national parks and public land management agencies, and efforts to cut the public and Tribes out of public land management.
“New Mexico’s public lands are being used as political pawns,” said Charlotte Overby, vice president of conservation field programs at the Conservation Lands Foundation. “The Trump administration is trying to strip protections from places like Chaco Canyon and national monuments through executive action, while Congress is mandating more lease sales and eliminating hard-fought, collaborative planning processes local people and the public worked hard to achieve. It’s not one attack, it’s a coordinated and systematic attempt to literally remove the public from public lands. Public lands belong to everyone, not to companies or a handful of wealthy individuals who seek to develop and profit off them.”
“Chaco is not a resource to be extracted, it is the origin of our Pueblo world, and this administration keeps treating it like an obstacle instead of a living homeland,” said Keegan King, executive director of the Native Land Institute. “First they came for the buffer zone. Now we’re watching the same pattern repeat across every corner of New Mexico’s public lands, monuments shrunk without our consent, tribal consultation reduced to a formality, decisions made in Washington before our governors ever get a seat at the table. The federal government has a trust responsibility to Tribal Nations, not a courtesy it extends when convenient. Every time these protections are stripped away, the cost isn’t just what’s drilled or logged, it’s the trust between our nations and this government, and that erosion doesn’t show up on anyone’s balance sheet.”
“Public lands are first and foremost ancestral lands of America’s Tribes. The larger threats we are seeing to public lands are threats to Tribal sovereignty, culture, identity, spirituality and subsistence,” said Andrew Black, director of Tribal lands and waters at the National Wildlife Federation. “Right now, energy dominance asks what can we extract from the land for the land is regarded as a commodity belonging to us. However, we must reverse this paradigm to see that we belong to the land as part of a larger interconnected community for what we do to the land, water, air, and wildlife we fundamentally do to ourselves. The challenge before us is not simply to preserve landscapes. It is to preserve right relationships —between people and the land, between generations, and ultimately between humanity and the larger web of life.”
“America’s public lands are under assault, and science itself is under siege. The very core of our national natural treasures and cultural sites and stories are being undermined through policy shifts, lack of public input, and staffing shortages,” said Elaine Leslie, executive council member with the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. “Redefining what constitutes harm to species at-risk can only result in the demise of animals and their habitats already on the brink from impacts such as climate change, invasive species, resource extraction, and fragmentation. Our nation’s natural and cultural resources and history depend upon our collective voices to protect our public lands now and for generations to come.”
Audio, video, photos, and transcripts from today’s event and previous events will be available in the Keep Parks Public media archive.
The Keep Parks Public campaign is a project of the Center for Western Priorities, which is partnering with local conservation groups to elevate the voices of leading experts on threats to outdoor access, from budget cuts and funding freezes to attempts to sell off public lands entirely.
The Keep Parks Public tour kicked off in July 2025, making stops in Denver, Las Cruces, Tucson, Flagstaff, Moab, Salt Lake City, Grand Junction, and Jackson. This summer, we’re stopping in Santa Fe (7/30), Tucson (8/28), and more locations around the West.
The public is invited to share their thoughts and join the campaign to Keep Parks Public and stop the attacks on America’s public lands.
Top threats to New Mexico’s Public Lands
- The Chaco Canyon buffer rollback
The Bureau of Land Management is moving to gut the 10-mile protective buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site sacred to more than 20 Pueblo tribes, implemented under the Biden administration. The Trump administration wants to eliminate the buffer as part of its “Unleashing American Energy” agenda, even though 90% of the surrounding terrain is already leased. BLM’s current proposal offers three options: eliminate the buffer entirely, cut it in half, or leave it intact. The public comment deadline just passed on July 29.Sen. Martin Heinrich and the rest of New Mexico’s congressional delegation have introduced a permanent fix to protect the region and its cultural sites: the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would permanently bar new oil and gas leasing on federal lands within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, closing the door the administration is now trying to force back open. It’s currently stalled in Congress, but it’s the only proposal on the table that would take the buffer zone question out of the hands of whoever occupies the White House. - Monuments in the crosshairs
Mark Allison with New Mexico Wild warns that Trump’s decision to reduce Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah could put Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, Rio Grande del Norte, and Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks national monuments at risk. Leaked Interior Department documents have listed those three New Mexico monuments as potential targets for reductions, with Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks specifically named as one of six sites under consideration. - Wildland firefighting reorganization
The administration recently stood up a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, consolidating firefighting away from individual Interior bureaus, including the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, and into one central office, over bipartisan congressional objections. Meanwhile, the Forest Service has already lost about 5,900 people, roughly 16% of its staff, through early retirements, resignations, and buyouts, with proposed 2026 staffing cuts of 30% or more on top of that. - Park staffing: a mixed but still bad picture
DOGE’s “Fork in the Road” email pushed roughly 2,400 NPS employees into early retirement or resignation in January 2025, about 12 percent of the workforce, and then Interior fired around 1,000 more NPS employees that February in what staff called the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Total NPS staff losses since then are estimated at 25 percent. Rep. Gabe Vasquez has said staffing at Carlsbad Caverns specifically has declined 20 percent, leaving the park unable to run regular visitation hours or after-school programs. That October, both Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands closed entirely during the 35-day-adjacent federal shutdown, with Rep. Vasquez warning “we’re going to see minimal staffing across our public land system.”This June, Vasquez sent Interior Secretary Burgum a letter demanding an explanation for why roughly $90 million in NPS entrance fee revenue, money meant for repairs at parks like White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns, was instead redirected to beautification projects in Washington, D.C., during peak summer visitor season.
- Congress eyeing public land sales
Sen. Mike Lee proposed striking a provision requiring Interior to maintain ownership of all existing National Park Service units, which would open the door to selling park land, in a state home to Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, Bandelier, Chaco Canyon, and Valles Caldera. An earlier version of the reconciliation bill would have greenlit selling off roughly 1.23 million acres of public land, and even after that language was stripped, the bill still clawed back $267 million in committed park staffing funds. - Rolling back drilling accountability
BLM is proposing to slash lease bond minimums to 1950s and ’60s levels, cutting statewide bonds from $500,000 to $25,000 regardless of how many wells they cover, while eliminating methane waste minimization plans and leak detection and repair requirements. This directly undercuts rules credited with keeping New Mexico’s methane intensity in the Permian Basin at less than half of Texas’s, and threatens to stick taxpayers with a massive orphan well clean up bill. - Expanded oil and gas leasing across the Permian and San Juan basins
Since the “One Big Beautiful Bill” took effect on July 4, 2025, BLM has leased roughly 61,400 acres of federal land in New Mexico across three completed quarterly sales: 7,501.76 acres in July 2025 for $58.26 million, 20,399 acres in January 2026 for $326.8 million (nearly all in New Mexico, with a single Oklahoma parcel), and 33,530 acres in May 2026 that brought in just over $4 billion, the largest lease sale total in BLM history.More is coming. BLM has scheduled an August 19, 2026 sale offering 26 parcels totaling 20,334 acres across New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and has opened comment on a proposed November 2026 sale covering 30 more parcels totaling 8,071 acres in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. If the August sale goes through as planned, it would push the total leased in New Mexico since OBBBA past 80,000 acres in just over a year.
- Weakening the Endangered Species Act
The administration has proposed rolling back Endangered Species Act regulations that would severely limit how much critical habitat can be designated for species headed toward extinction, alarming conservationists about the Mexican gray wolf’s future. A related change opens New Mexico’s forests to logging and mining by loosening wildlife habitat protections. - Push to delist the Mexican gray wolf
The House Natural Resources Committee has advanced the Enhancing Safety for Animals Act with bipartisan support, which would strip federal ESA protections from the Mexican wolf entirely. Separately, federal and state agencies are preparing to downlist the wolf from endangered to threatened, even as at least 23 wolves have been documented in trapping incidents across New Mexico since 2022. - Budget: parks got a reprieve for FY2026, but FY2027 is a fresh fight
The FY2026 appropriations law, enacted January 23, 2026, gave NPS $3.267 billion, 54 percent more than what the administration had requested. That blocked what would have been a $900 million, 31 percent operations cut and the elimination of funding for roughly 350 park sites.The administration’s FY2027 budget proposal, released in April, seeks to slash $736 million from park operations and would shrink the NPS workforce from about 16,000 to roughly 13,000. Sen. Heinrich called it proof “this administration is not committed to keeping the Park Service intact” and warned it would gut the regional scientists, archaeologists, and historians parks rely on even if front-line ranger jobs are nominally spared. That budget fight will play out in Congress this fall.