Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued a Secretarial Order today restating the Trump administration’s desire to giving public lands ranchers their full wish list, including fast-tracked permits, maximized livestock use, and loosened protections on killing native wildlife. While much of the Secretarial Order (SO) simply restates the same messaging and promises of early missives, today’s announcement sets timelines for all of the land-management agencies (including national parks and national wildlife refuges) to identify ways to exploit even more land for grazing use. “Once again we see the Trump administration fundamentally misunderstand—or misleadingly overstate—the significance of public lands ranching, which contributes less than 2 percent of all the beef in the U.S. markets, by claiming that weakening bedrock environmental protections will somehow lower beef prices for the American consumer,” said Josh Osher, policy director for Western Watersheds Project. “Public lands are a significant source of wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, carbon storage, and watershed protections for all Americans, but Secretary Burgum is making plain that he only values the special interest industries that extract and exploit our natural resources.” The SO establishes a new “Rangeland Health Initiative” but rather than ensuring that public rangelands managed by the Department of the Interior are actually healthy and productive, the Initiative’s primary purpose is to expand grazing at all costs and expense to wildlife, native plants, and resilient ecosystems. Components of a true Rangeland Health Initiative would include: -
Immediately suspending or reducing livestock grazing in all allotments that are failing to meet rangeland health standards due to current livestock grazing, estimated at over 37 million acres . -
Reducing the forage allocated to livestock to no more than 25-30 percent to ensure sufficient forage is available for native wildlife and plant resilience and productivity. -
Establishing a drought policy that requires suspending or reducing livestock grazing when areas are experiencing persistent and/or extreme drought conditions. -
Prioritizing the health of native carnivores and other wildlife over the production of livestock by ensuring no net loss of wildlife populations on federal public lands. -
Ensuring immediate compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other bedrock environmental laws including prioritizing public input in all rangeland management decisions. “The Trump administration is putting the livestock industry ahead of protecting our public lands and native wildlife,” said Dan Brister, staff attorney of Wilderness Watch. “This sweeping order pushes to expand livestock grazing, resurrect suspended grazing privileges, and weaken protections for native predators, potentially threatening even our most protected Wilderness areas. America’s wildest public lands are not private feedlots.”
“Vacant grazing allotments and other public lands that are currently spared from the destructive impacts of commercial livestock grazing aren’t ‘underutilized’,” said Chris Krupp, public lands attorney for WildEarth Guardians. “In fact, because these lands aren’t grazed, they are among the very best and most secure habitat for elk, mule deer, sage grouse, grizzly bears, native fish, and so many other species that are vital to the health of our public lands and our Western economies.” This year, ProPublica and High Country News published a three-part investigation into the public lands grazing system, examining the subsidies that support it, its environmental impacts and the political influence that can limit oversight. The investigation found that public lands grazing is concentrated among a small number of wealthy individuals and corporations, with the top 10 percent of permittees controlling roughly two-thirds of grazing on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands and more than half on Forest Service lands. At the same time, federal grazing fees averaged about 93 percent below the market rate for private forage, and public lands ranchers could access at least $2.5 billion in federal subsidies in 2024. The investigation also found that BLM assessments identified at least 38 million acres degraded by grazing, with no land health assessment on record for another 35 million acres. “Without consideration of recent huge staff losses at the BLM (a decrease from 11,000 employees in 2024 to 5,800 employees in August of 2026) the Order expands the work that agency employees are being asked to do. In addition to losing capacity, the agency is losing the specialists. Massive changes to public lands management require expertise that is rapidly disappearing from BLM, and we expect that implementation of this Order will be slipshod,” said Chandra Rosenthal, Western Lands Advocate at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. |
