Grazing Permit Loophole Harming the American West? Part One

This article by Mark Olalde, ProPublica; Lucas Waldron, ProPublica; and Jimmy Tobias, High Country News; appeared on Colorado Newsline on December 6, 2025. This story was originally published by ProPublica and co-published with High Country News. We are sharing it in three installments.

Once every 10 years, ranchers must renew the permits that allow their cattle, sheep and other livestock to graze on the West’s public domain. These renewals are the government’s best opportunity to address how those livestock are harming the environment.

The Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service, the federal agencies that manage the majority of public lands, are required by law to review each permit before deciding whether to place additional conditions on it or — in rare cases — to deny its renewal.

But in 2014, Congress mandated that the agencies automatically renew permits for another decade if they are unable to complete the reviews. This exemption has dramatically reduced scrutiny of grazing’s impact on public lands.

In 2013, the BLM approved grazing on 47% of its land open to livestock without an environmental review, a ProPublica and High Country News analysis of agency data showed. (The status of about another 10% of BLM land was unclear that year.) A decade later, the BLM authorized grazing on roughly 75% of its acreage without review, the analysis found.

A similar study by conservation group Western Watersheds Project found a steep decline in environmental reviews on grazing land managed by the Forest Service.

This diminishing oversight has coincided with a sharp drop in the number of federal staff who complete the reviews. These staffers also conduct land health assessments of large parcels to help inform whether permits in the area need changes to protect natural resources.

The BLM’s rangeland management staff shrank 39% between 2020 and 2024, according to Office of Personnel Management data. President Donald Trump’s administration is further hamstringing the BLM — about 1 in 10 rangeland staff members left the agency between last November’s election and June, according to agency records.

When agency staff aren’t monitoring the land, cattle can graze where they’re not supposed to, or in greater numbers or for longer periods than permitted. Such overgrazing can spread invasive plants by dispersing seeds and disturbing the soil, pushing out native species and worsening wildfire risk. When herds strip vegetation near creeks and streams, silt flows into the waterways, wiping out fish nurseries. And, without adequate staff to amend permits, agencies lose the chance to reduce the number of animals on an allotment — and the climate-warming methane they emit.

Once a permit is renewed, with or without a review, it becomes more difficult to rectify such harms for another decade.

Ten current and former BLM rangeland management employees said in interviews that they felt pressure to go easy on ranchers. This included downplaying environmental harm in permit reviews and land health assessments, according to BLM staffers who worked in rangeland management. Several spoke on condition of anonymity because they still work for the government.

“Sometimes the truth was spoken, but, more often than not, it was not the truth,” one BLM employee said of agency oversight.

In a statement, an agency spokesperson said, “The BLM is committed to transparency, sound science, and public participation as it administers grazing permits and considers updates to grazing regulations.”

In a shift, the Trump administration placed the approval process for all the BLM’s contracts and agreements of value in the hands of political appointees rather than career civil servants. In recent months, officials cut funding for an app that assists ranchers in collecting soil and vegetation data for use in permitting, for contractors who manage the data that informs grazing permits, for New Mexico farmers growing seeds used in restoration projects and for soil research in the Southwest, according to BLM records obtained by ProPublica and High Country News.

“Does not believe this action is needed to meet the administration priorities,” the cancellations read.

The Forest Service did not respond to requests for comment. The White House referred questions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which said in a statement, “Ranching is often a multi-generation practice that serves to keep working landscapes intact, while also preserving open space, and benefiting recreation, wildlife, and watersheds.”

To gauge the effects of this shrinking oversight, ProPublica and High Country News toured parcels of federal grazing land, called allotments, in Arizona, Colorado, Montana and Nevada, finding evidence of either unpermitted grazing or habitat degraded by livestock in each state. In Arizona alone, reporters witnessed such issues in two national conservation areas, a national monument and a national forest.

On an allotment within Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, an expanse of desert grasslands and forested streams southeast of Tucson, the BLM lets up to 1,500 head of cattle graze across roughly 35,000 acres. These permits were recently reauthorized until 2035 using the exemption that allows environmental reviews to be skipped.

Read Part Two…