Public Pressure Forces Lawmakers to Drop 500,000-Acre Land Sell-Off

Buried in a budget bill. Ripped out by public pressure. Here’s how it happened and what it means for the next fight.

Thanks to thousands of calls, messages, and a whole lot of public heat, one of the most dangerous public land sell-offs in recent memory is officially dead.

They tried to bury it in a budget bill. A last-minute amendment that would have forced the sale or transfer of roughly 500,000 acres of federal public land across Utah and Nevada. No environmental review. No public comment. No maps. Just a directive to mark the land as "disposable" and move it out the door.

Yesterday that provision got pulled.

And it wasn’t luck. Thousands of calls were made by members of this community and others like it. You read the alert, you picked up the phone, you shared it with others. That kind of collective pressure makes change. Thank you to everyone who gave their time to fight this.

The provision was added on May 7 by Representatives Celeste Maloy (R-UT) and Mark Amodei (R-NV), slipped into the “Big Beautiful Budget Bill” that’s anything but. The clause would have sidestepped decades of legal precedent fo…