Since the foundational laws that govern U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service (USFS) public lands were passed decades ago, these agencies have operated with an obligation to balance competing interests and uses, and manage public lands for the benefit of all Americans, as well as the lands’ natural ecosystems. Now, a newly released USFS memorandum offers an alarming glimpse into how the Trump administration views the traditional USFS mission.
The memo directs agency officials to expand livestock grazing on USFS lands and remove all barriers to increased grazing levels. Forest Service officials are instructed to prioritize reopening public lands that haven’t been grazed by livestock for decades (for example vacant allotments in the Uintas) and fast-track permitting. Worse, the memo instructs the USFS to increase stocking by 500,000 Animal Unit Months (one cow-calf pair or five sheep for a month) over the next two years.
The same philosophy appears in the Trump administration’s proposed overhaul of the BLM’s grazing regulations. The new, proposed rules would weaken land health safeguards, reduce opportunities for public participation and create additional requirements before the agency can reduce grazing in response to documented resource damage.
Like the USFS memo, the BLM’s proposed regulations are built around the premise that grazing should be expanded, protected and prioritized. The proposal repeatedly emphasizes regulatory certainty for permittees while treating ecological protections and public oversight as obstacles to be streamlined away or removed.
In the USFS memo and similar proposed BLM rules, the message is clear: livestock grazing is no longer merely one use among many on our public lands. The administrative mandate: expand livestock use across all federal lands. Why does only one use, and its interest group, merit special treatment to the exclusion of other uses of the land?
Is it because most of our nation’s beef supply comes from our public lands? Nope; our federal lands provide 1.6% of the forage used to produce American beef. Erase every cow from all BLM allotments tomorrow and the grocery shelf won’t notice; the market would absorb the loss with ordinary herd fluctuation. In fact, in 2024 we exported seven times more beef than the entire public lands grazing program produces.
Or, is it because livestock lopping off “extra grass growth” is a “benign use” of the land (compared to extractive industries like logging and oil and gas drilling), and so we can afford its expansion without significant ecological impacts?
Wrong again. According to the BLM’s own data, grazing has measurably degraded about 38 million acres of BLM land, an area about half the size of New Mexico. The agency has no land health assessments for another 35 million acres, but conservationists and ecologists can tell you what is likely happening on most of these grazed allotments: our streams are dying, our songbirds vanishing, our trout extirpated, our soils compacted past recovery and our native bunchgrasses replaced by cheatgrass, the invasive grass that fuels the megafires occurring across the sagebrush sea.
The verdict is in: all of this will get even worse with climate change if grazing continues at current levels.
These public land agencies do not just serve ranchers; they are supposed to serve all American people, while accounting for the needs of wildlife and watersheds. Tribal nations, wildlife watchers, hunters, anglers and recreationists all have a stake in how public lands are managed. The USFS memo and BLM regulations avoid any comparable discussion of barriers faced by other public land users, or the land itself: biodiversity loss, fencing impacts on wildlife, degraded riparian areas, or the many other ecological consequences associated with livestock grazing. Rather, they reflect a retrograde philosophy that places private interests and industry at the center of federal land management while marginalizing everyone else and the land itself.
Be assured, the dedicated, agency public servants who work on the ground did not ask for these new regulations that are throwing the multiple-use framework established by Congress out the window. There is one opportunity to comment on the new, proposed BLM regulations; open until July 13. Western Watersheds Project has put together an online tool kit to help with comments to the BLM about these profound changes coming to our public lands.