New Mexico could lose out on billions in federal mineral leasing dollars next year unless Congress acts, the state's leading fiscal analyst warned Friday.

The federal budget bill Congress passed in July, which included enormous tax cuts, would increase the national deficit by trillions , triggering a federal law that automatically enacts cuts in other areas to offset deficit spending. Included among those automatic cuts would be the billions in federal dollars New Mexico receives each year from resource extraction on federal lands.

Congress in the past has always voted to suspend that rule, called PAYGO, or Pay-As-You-Go, and avert those automatic changes, and has until the end of the year to do so.

"Why I'm worried about this is, politically, there's not a lot of other states that ar

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