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.

During a visit in late April, a grove of hearty cottonwoods stood against the afternoon sun, casting cool shadows over a narrow creek. This stretch of green sustains birds, frogs, snakes and ocelots. It’s also designated under federal law as critical habitat for five threatened or endangered species. Cattle are not allowed in the creekbed, but a thin barbed-wire fence meant to stop the animals lay crumpled in the dirt. 

A native leopard frog broke the hot afternoon stillness as it leapt from the creek’s bank. Its launching pad was the hardened mud imprint of a cow hoof, and it landed with a plop in water fouled by cow feces and the partially submerged bones of a cow corpse. A half-dozen cattle crashed through the creek and up the steep embankment, tearing up plants that protected the soil from erosion and sending silt billowing into the water. 

“Looks like a sewer,” Chris Bugbee, a wildlife ecologist with the environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity, remarked as he took in the destruction. “This one hurts. There is no excuse.”

A 2024 BLM land health assessment listed the grazing allotment as “ALL STANDARDS MET.” In April, a camouflaged trail camera bearing the agency’s insignia was pointed toward the creek. (ProPublica and High Country News submitted a public records request for images on the camera’s memory card in May, but the BLM has yet to fulfill the request.)

No ranchers paid to graze their livestock in this allotment last year, according to BLM data, so it is unclear who owned the cattle. The Arizona Cattle Growers’ Association, which represents ranchers in the state, did not respond to requests for comment.

Over the past eight years, Bugbee and his team have annually surveyed grazing impacts on the banks of streams and rivers in the Southwest that are designated as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act. Half of the 2,400 miles of streams they inspected “showed significant damage from livestock grazing,” according to their March report.

The industry maintains that the presence of livestock benefits many ecosystems, pointing to studies that have found, for example, that grazing can increase soil’s ability to hold carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to climate change. Other research suggests that, when managed properly, grazing can improve the health of habitat enough to support a more diverse mix of species.

Grazing also reduces vegetation that could fuel wildfires. Frank Shirts Jr., owner of the largest sheep operation on Forest Service land, said that sheep eat invasive weeds and brush, creating firebreaks. “These animals are fantastic,” he said.

Retta Bruegger, a range ecologist at Colorado State University, said that some ecosystems, especially those that receive more precipitation, can withstand more intense grazing without permanently damaging the land. In regions where plants evolved over many years alongside large grazers like cattle, livestock can “provide a very important ecosystem function.”

“We should be asking, ‘Are there individual producers who need to be doing a better job?’ instead of asking, ‘Should there be grazing or no grazing?’” said Bruegger, who supports balancing the industry’s needs with the land’s.

But answering those questions, she said, would require adequate staff to monitor the land.

After a century of intense grazing wore down public lands, a court ruled in 1974 that grazing permits were subject to environmental reviews, and Congress passed a law two years later mandating them every decade.

For years, a backlog of permit reviews grew, as federal land management agencies lacked the staff to inspect all their territory — 240 million acres across BLM and Forest Service jurisdictions. Around 2000, Congress began giving temporary approval for regulators to skip reviews. Western Republicans, with the livestock industry’s support, pushed to enshrine the concept in law. The idea ultimately received bipartisan approval in December 2014, after being slipped into a must-pass defense spending bill.

Some conservationists now call it simply “the loophole.”

Many in the livestock industry lambaste the lack of reviews. When permits are automatically renewed, the law does not allow the terms to change, so ranchers are prevented from updating their grazing practices.

“It just locks people into grazing the same place, the same time, year after year,” said Chris Jasmine, manager of biodiversity and rangelands for Nevada Gold Mines, which owns 11 ranches in northern Nevada.

To help inform permit renewals, teams of BLM experts — rangeland specialists, hydrologists, botanists, soil scientists and wildlife biologists — assess the health of grazing allotments. 

When the process is working as intended, these assessments are considered in permit reviews. But the current lack of staff has left large swaths of land without scrutiny.

All told, the BLM oversees 155 million acres of public lands available for grazing. But the agency has no record of completing land health assessments for more than 35 million acres, nearly a quarter of its total.

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.”

“This can’t be the future of public lands,” Bugbee, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said of parcels degraded by cattle, likening the land to a “mowed lawn.”

Agency staff pointed to myriad reasons why the environment is suffering.

For example, after a wildfire, the BLM aims to keep livestock off the land for two years to allow the ecosystem to recover. But ranchers often negotiate an earlier return to the public pastures where their livestock graze, said Steve Ellis, who spent his career with the BLM and Forest Service, rising to high-level positions in both.

“There was always pressure to get back on,” Ellis said. “That’s not a new thing. It’s just part of working for the bureau.”

The government’s support for ranchers can add to the damage. Land management agencies sometimes seed invasive grasses, which can benefit livestock, although those plants can drive out species that are native to the local ecosystem. And state and federal agencies kill predators such as wolves and cougars — also integral to a healthy balance of species — to protect ranchers’ economic interests.

Some staff members also question the agency’s oversight.

BLM employees said that in some permit reviews and land health assessments, rank-and-file staff noted the presence of threatened and endangered species, which would have triggered tighter environmental controls, only for agency managers to delete that information from their reports.

One current BLM staffer called the reviews “rubber stamping” and said higher-ranking staff who controlled the text of reports “wouldn’t let me stick anything into the official documentation that acknowledged things were in poor shape.”

Another complicating factor, according to BLM staff, is that ranchers are often invited to participate in fieldwork to gauge whether they are overgrazing. The results, employees said, were watered-down reviews and assessments.

The industry, though, is critical of the assessment process for other reasons. Erin Spaur, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, said it’s an inflexible “one-size-fits-all approach” that doesn’t sufficiently account for differences in ecosystems.

“There are huge cultural problems within the agency,” said Dennis Willis, who spent more than three decades with the BLM, including managing rangeland, adding that “there’s a real fear of dealing with grazing problems.”

Some ranchers acknowledge the environmental impacts of their industry. But they say that more flexibility — not stricter oversight — would make them better stewards of the land.

Jasmine, with Nevada Gold Mines, contends that ranching can be done without denuding the West. A sixth-generation Nevadan, he oversees the mining company’s ranching operations, which run about 5,000 head of cattle.

On a sunny July day near Carlin, Nevada, Jasmine walked through chest-high vegetation to show off the recovery of Maggie Creek, a tributary to the Humboldt River that flows through a checkerboard of public and private lands. Photographs from the 1980s show barren ground around the shallow creek. When ranchers changed how they rotated their herds in the 1990s to give the streambed more rest, the land bounced back, Jasmine said, as a chorus of chirping birds punctuated his story. He credited a BLM biologist with initiating many of the projects that helped revive Maggie Creek.

“It’s a renewable resource. That grass that they’re eating right now will come back next year and the year after that if managed properly,” he said. “It’s about not eating the same plants in the same place year after year after year.”

Jasmine touted the company’s goal of protecting locally important species, its sage grouse restoration projects and its partnership with the BLM, which targeted grazing to remove unwanted vegetation and create a firebreak.

But Nevada Gold Mines — a joint venture between two companies with a combined value of around $150 billion — operates in a different economic reality than most ranchers and can afford to keep cattle off the land long enough for it to recover.

Smaller ranchers face slim profit margins, making it attractive to heavily graze federal lands, where the cost is much lower than on state or private land. 

For years, some politicians and environmental groups have proposed protecting degraded or sensitive habitats by paying ranchers to retire their permits, making the areas off limits to grazing and preserving the land as wildlife habitat. Ranchers have occasionally taken these offers. But the industry as a whole is hesitant to surrender grazing permits.

In October, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat, introduced a bill to further voluntary retirement, calling it “a pragmatic solution that supports local economies, protects biodiversity, and saves taxpayer dollars by reducing the cost of administering grazing programs.”

Louis Wertz, a spokesperson for the Western Landowners Alliance, said that the conservation-minded ranchers who make up his group want to both stay in business and “live in a place that is vibrant, full of life, provides clean water, has clean air.” But when it comes to food production, he added, “the expectations we have of both being environmentally harmless and healthy and cheap are untenable. Over the last 150 years in the United States, we have chosen cheapness at the expense of environmental quality.”

Like Jasmine, Wertz said that understaffing at the BLM and Forest Service deprives ranchers of an opportunity to change how they manage their herds, even when they want to.

“It is important that there be accountability for producers on the landscape,” Wertz said, but there should also be “flexibility so producers can be economically successful and so they can do what is right for the landscape.”