Destroying the American West for Cheap Steak

Public lands in the American West face multiple threats from the Trump administration and private interests looking to exploit natural resources. While mining and energy projects grab the most headlines, hundreds of millions of acres are also at risk from administration efforts to expand cattle grazing. According to a three-story investigation co-published by ProPublica and High Country News, government programs designed in the 1930s continue to provide massive public subsidies to cattle ranchers — with a few very wealthy and politically connected families reaping the benefits. According to the investigation, 

Roughly two-thirds of all the livestock grazing on [Bureau of Land Management] acreage is controlled by just 10% of ranchers, our analysis showed. On Forest Service land, the top 10% of permittees control more than 50% of grazing. This concentration of control has been the status quo for decades. In 1999, the San Jose Mercury News undertook a similar study and found that the largest ranchers controlled the same proportion of grazing within BLM jurisdiction as they do today.

Federal agencies, meanwhile, forewent more than $200 million in 2024 by undercharging ranchers for forage. This year, the Trump administration released a plan pledging to further lower costs for the ranching industry.

With federal agencies understaffed — both the BLM and the Forest Service have been hit hard by cuts — it is virtually impossible to perform environmental reviews on public land allotments, which used to constitute an important component of the permit renewal process.

Where the BLM has conducted such assessments, it found grazing had degraded at least 38 million acres, an area about half the size of New Mexico. And close to two-thirds of the land it listed as being in good shape had not been checked in more than a decade, the analysis found.

The situation, though, is even worse than those numbers indicate, as the agency has often skipped permit reviews on land in poor condition. Even if the BLM had previously found the environment to be in bad shape, Congress’ 2014 law still dictated automatic renewal. Of the acreage the agency had previously found to be degraded due to livestock, 82% was reauthorized for grazing without a review, according to ProPublica and High Country News’ analysis.

Several BLM employees said agency higher-ups instruct staff to study land that’s in better condition while avoiding allotments that are in worse shape or more controversial. Environmental groups such as the Western Watersheds Project as well as local stockmen’s associations are quick to litigate changes to permits. Automatic renewals avoid these drawn-out public fights. “We were just using a bureaucratic loophole,” one staffer said. “We were allowing ongoing degradation of habitat.”

The investigation also found that, even when federal workers try to enforce existing rules, they can face political pressure to avoid doing their job. Some of Donald Trump’s federal appointments show just how powerful an ally the industry has. The report highlights a few of these figures, including: 

Karen Budd-Falen, a self-described “cowboy lawyer” [was appointed] to a high-level post at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Budd-Falen comes from a prominent ranching family and owns a stake in a Wyoming cattle ranch, according to her most recent financial disclosure released by the Interior Department. She also has a long history of suing the federal government over the enforcement of grazing regulations. In one of her best-known cases, she used the anti-corruption RICO law — often used to target organized crime — to sue individual BLM staffers over their enforcement of grazing regulations. 

President Donald Trump [also] nominated Michael Boren, a tech entrepreneur and rancher, as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a post overseeing the Forest Service. Boren has a contentious history with the Forest Service, which manages a national recreation area that surrounds his 480-acre ranch in Idaho. Among other issues, a company he controlled received a cease-and-desist letter from the agency in 2024 for allegedly clearing national forest land and building a private cabin on it.

Read all three stories here, here and here.