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The federal government is rewriting the rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.
ProPublica and High Country News reported last year that grazing on public lands is overseen by a nearly century-old system that provides hefty subsidies to some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address the negative environmental impacts.
Rangeland management experts say overgrazing is degrading public lands, but new rules being drafted by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management — the first overhaul since 1995 — could actually increase overgrazing.
The proposed rule would also ratchet back public participation in agency decisions to allow grazing on federal public lands. The BLM’s proposed updates would severely limit who has a say and when they can object, and eliminate many steps that allowed the public to observe and comment on permit issuance and renewal decisions.
“It’s clear they’re trying to reduce the involvement of non-ranchers,” said one BLM employee involved in managing rangelands.
The BLM has not responded to questions about the proposed regulations, which were released in May and will be submitted to the agency again in mid-July for further consideration following a public comment period.
In a June news release announcing the measure, the agency said it “reflects the Trump Administration’s priorities to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, promote productive working lands, and strengthen local economies.”
ProPublica and High Country News spoke to multiple current and former BLM employees to assess the impact of the proposed regulations. Some asked to remain anonymous because they are still employed by the BLM, such as BLM staff involved in rangeland management. Employees agreed that the latest regulations offer several concrete benefits, including requiring government agencies to study the ecological impacts of all uses of public lands, from logging and recreation to mining and oil drilling. Current regulations limit these studies to the livestock industry, where overgrazing has revealed damage to tens of millions of acres.
This regulation would allow the BLM to more informally handle low-level violations of grazing regulations and avoid potentially unnecessary conflicts between ranchers and regulators. Clean up sections of the code that may conflict with recent court decisions or laws. It also gives government agencies and ranchers more flexibility in how they manage their ranches, enabling faster decision-making based on local ecosystem needs.
Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Land Council, a cattle industry group, said in a news release that the update is a “huge step forward.”
He said the current regulations grew out of the “Cow-Free by 1993” movement in the early 1990s, which was hostile to ranching and aimed at removing livestock from public lands. “The resulting regulations have left ranchers with less flexibility to take full advantage of the scientific and management advances made by the ranching industry over the past 35 years,” Canterbury said.
Other groups working on rangeland management say the regulations go too far in the opposite direction and tip the scales against ranchers. They point to proposals that would allow ranchers to continue business as usual if they challenge authorities’ decisions to limit grazing, threaten Native American tribes’ ability to graze bison, and impose highly subsidized grazing fees. (ProPublica and High Country News revealed that in 2024, the federal government charged ranchers $284 million below market value for the use of public lands.)
“We’re going to see a lot more habitat for cattle and sheep, and we’re going to see a lot more damage,” said Josh Osher, director of public policy at the Western Watershed Project, a conservation group. “I think it’s having a big impact on wildlife.”
Cows gather around a water tank on a Bureau of Land Management lot near Elko, Nevada, the surrounding area exposed under the weight of grazing and footfall. Aerial support with LightHawk
“Back to the Ronald Reagan era.”
The livestock industry has influenced regulatory reviews both from outside and within the Home Office.
Two major industry groups, the National Cattle and Beef Association and the Council on Public Lands, publicly celebrated meetings with the secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture departments in the spring. The agenda also included a memorandum of understanding that would allow industry groups to provide guidance to sectors, such as a Grazing Action Plan that would include regulatory updates.
The groups did not respond to requests for comment. (The Western Landowners Alliance, which represents conservation-minded ranchers and landowners, said it is still considering the regulations.)
Meanwhile, representatives of Native American tribes and conservation groups told ProPublica and High Country News that the government did not give them an opportunity to provide input on the draft regulations before they were published.
They also take issue with the process due to the involvement of Karen Budd Farren, a senior Interior Department official and longtime grazing advocate whose family is in the ranching business. She served in the first Trump administration but was barred from discussing grazing policy due to potential conflicts of interest. But after rejoining the department, she received an ethics waiver that allowed her to work on grazing policy.
In December, Budfalen participated in a discussion about public land management with Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis. During the event, Budfalen called grazing regulations an issue “probably closest to my heart,” offering a rare perspective on efforts to update regulations.
“You want to know what put public ranches out of business, and it was Bruce Babbitt’s regulations,” she told Mr. Lummis, referring to the regulations of Bruce Babbitt, who served as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Interior from 1993 to 2001. “By the beginning of next year, we’re going to see completely new regulations that don’t just fix some of Babbitt’s things. We’re going back to the Ronald Reagan era and rolling those regulations back.”
“I’m very excited about these regulations,” she said.
Native American tribes that manage bison herds say Budfalen’s efforts to help ranchers could harm their operations. Several ranchers and ranchers associations in Montana, formerly headed by Bud Farren, are slamming a conservation group called American Prairie, which uses permits to graze bison herds to revitalize local ecosystems. Ranchers are concerned that this will result in subsidized lease payments and that the bison could spread disease to cattle.
The Trump administration sided with the ranchers in this dispute. It could first revoke American Prairie permits, then re-draft grazing regulations to make livestock operations on public lands “production-oriented” and eliminate herd permits used to revitalize ecosystems. Tribes fear they will also lose permits for the bison herds they manage to preserve cultural practices and restore land.
“We’re really concerned about this,” said OJ Semans Sr., a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and executive director of the Confederation of Great Tribes, which represents more than 15 tribes. “I’m kind of confused about how badly written it is.”
Habitat for endangered and endangered species is overgrazed throughout the Southwest, including Arizona’s Coronado National Forest (left) and national trust lands in the Santa Rita Mountains (right).
Fewer public inputs, more public land grazed
Ranchers have long complained that their operations are mired in litigation, with conservationists quick to sue to prevent them from putting their herds on public land. BLM updates will reduce the ability of green groups to challenge decisions.
The agency is proposing to change the definition of “concerned public,” meaning those who have a say in the management of grazing lands. Under the new proposal, members of the public would need to demonstrate a “demonstrable” interest in the grazing in question. The agency did not respond to requests to define its use of the word. But former BLM officials said that would likely raise the bar for who can be informed of and comment on the agency’s decisions. Environmentalists believe this means only those with business interests will be allowed to influence government agency decisions.
The new regulations would also remove the requirement that the BLM include the public in “consultation, cooperation, and coordination,” the agency’s process for gathering feedback as it prepares to take actions such as grazing permits. Staff say the update will significantly narrow down the audience they need to engage with.
Throughout the regulations, the agency proposed changes that would keep animals on land.
Mark Squillas, a law professor specializing in natural resources at the University of Colorado School of Law, said that if a rancher appeals an unfavorable ruling, the ruling would be automatically suspended, allowing the rancher to continue the very practices that were found to be harmful. “This effectively encourages everyone to appeal to avoid the decision,” Squillers said. “That’s a disaster.”
The new regulations also elevate the status of cattle as firefighters and make it easier to place cattle herds on public lands with the justification that they eat plants that can fuel wildfires.
Nada Culver, who served as BLM’s deputy director during the Biden administration, said some of the provisions would make it more difficult for government officials to tell ranchers to remove animals from their land, hampering their ability to address overgrazing. And it will be easier to renew permits to continue grazing under the new regulations, she said.
“Most of the text of this proposed regulation is devoted to explaining why the public is excluded from participating in nearly every step of the process,” Culver said.
The Trump administration is also prioritizing restocking vacant land that is empty of cattle and sheep because of their distance from water sources, the slow recovery from wildfires, and as officials try to eliminate invasive species. Within months of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, political appointees directed their staff to create a list of all vacant land that could house additional livestock.
“By the end of next year, all of the vacant land will be filled by ranchers,” Bud Farren said in a discussion with Lummis.
Grazing is permitted on BLM’s Horseshoe Allotment in Arizona’s Aguafria National Monument.
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