The Trump administration is considering increasing the number of cattle and sheep that roam public lands, which would expand the most widespread commercial use of those federal lands across Oregon’s high desert.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is proposing to overhaul its rules governing livestock grazing on millions of acres of federal public lands, including Oregon and Washington, in a move that has been largely applauded by cattlemen’s associations across the West.
Juniper trees dot a sea of sagebrush stretching for many miles in Harney County, Ore., on Dec. 18, 2025.
Eli Imadali / OPB
The proposal reflects the “Trump administration’s priority to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens, promote productive working lands and strengthen local economies,” according to a BLM press release.
But conservation groups aren’t buying it.
The groups opposing the administration’s actions argue livestock have already been overgrazing and degrading public lands for decades. They say the administration is trying to tip the scales toward livestock producers at the expense of wildlife habitat and other uses of public land.
Mark Salvo, a senior conservation advisor at the Oregon Natural Desert Association, said the administration’s claim that these rules are necessary to provide more support for livestock producers is ”without merit.”
“Livestock grazing is happening already wherever possible,” Salvo said.
The proposed BLM rules would overhaul how the agency assesses the health of rangelands and change environmental review processes. The rules would also limit who can participate in and comment on agency decisions, like when the BLM issues or renews a grazing permit.
The agency published the proposed rules in the Federal Register, the official journal of federal government actions, in May. The BLM is currently reviewing public comments it has received and is “coordinating with other government officials, and refining the final draft,” an agency spokesperson told OPB in an email.
The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association did not respond to an OPB request to comment on the BLM’s proposal.
In July, the Public Lands Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and American Sheep Industry Association did submit written public comments on behalf of their organizations and local affiliates — including the Oregon Cattlemen and Sheep Growers.
These groups largely applauded the Trump administration’s push to streamline a process they argue has held ranchers back for years, saying it would “optimize grazing for ecosystem benefits while retaining the core principle that public lands grazing is not only crucial to domestic food and fiber production but to the communities closest to these landscapes.”
They said updating regulations to reflect the evolving understanding of rangelands “requires regulations that both recognize the value of grazing and the complex multiple use patterns of today and tomorrow, rather than decades past.”
Livestock graze much of Oregon’s high desert
Federal government grazing permits are 10-year privileges to run livestock on public lands at highly subsidized rates.
In 2026, it costs $1.69 per animal unit month, or AUM — that’s the term the federal government uses to describe a cow and a calf pair or five sheep to graze per month. For comparison, the state of Oregon charges ranchers $24.27 per AUM on state-owned rangelands.
The two federal government agencies that primarily handle livestock grazing on public lands are the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service. In Oregon, the BLM alone authorizes livestock grazing on nearly 14 million acres across roughly 1,400 separate grazing allotments.
Conservation groups raise concerns
Environmental groups take issue with a wide-ranging list of changes in the new regulations, including what they say is the BLM’s “failure” to prepare a report that analyzes the impacts the proposed rules could have on the environment.
Under federal law, any federal land management agency proposing to extensively change regulations that could impact the environment is required to publish a report analyzing how the changes will affect the land, water and wildlife of the impacted ecosystems. That report is known as an environmental impact statement.
A BLM spokesperson told OPB the proposed rules are an administrative update that qualifies for a “categorical exclusion,” meaning it’s exempt from having to publish an environmental impacts report.
Salvo with the Oregon Natural Desert Association disagreed with that interpretation.
Left unchecked, Salvo said, cattle can eat their way through riparian habitat along waterways, trample and erode soils along river banks, eat through native vegetation and introduce invasive grasses that have made wildfires across the Great Basin worse.
“Congress required, and federal courts have confirmed time and again, that federal agencies must analyze the effects of such drastic policy changes on our environment and share their findings with the public,” he said. “But, of course, we’re not surprised that the current administration has declined to do that.”
Though the BLM is supposed to conduct environmental reviews of grazing permits when an allotment is up for renewal, independent analyses, including one from ProPublica and High Country News, have shown the agency has consistently fallen behind its own monitoring obligations.
The Trump administration’s proposed regulations would also expand the criteria that the BLM and the Forest Service use to evaluate rangeland health. The proposal would give land managers the ability to assess the impacts to rangeland health to include more than just cattle grazing, such as off-road vehicles, energy production or wild horses.
Salvo said that it’s hard to see the long-term benefit of this change, mostly because cattle tend to be the only commercial use on public lands.
“If you’re expanding land health standards from public lands to everybody, does it have the effect of distracting the agency’s attention away from the most pervasive use that is likely causing land health problems?” he said. “Or is it inviting a broader conversation to ensure that if it’s not livestock grazing that’s affecting land health in a particular piece of public land, what is it?”
Another major component of the BLM proposal would change the agency’s definition of “interested public” to “cognizable interest” on a specific agency decision, such as when it’s renewing or issuing a new grazing permit.
That means someone would have to express how they are directly affected or tied to a specific agency decision to submit feedback or public comments, Salvo said.
“Our interpretation of it is that it would effectively eliminate a member of the public from being recognized as an interested public in planning and management of their public lands,” Salvo said.
The new regulations would also limit the “consultation, cooperation, and coordination process to just the affected permittee [livestock producer] and the state,” when it’s deciding on a specific allotment.
Another conservation group, the Center for Biological Diversity, recently took the federal government to federal court over its push to open up vacant public lands across the West to more livestock. That case is still pending.
If the BLM adopts the rules in their current form, environmental groups will likely seek to block them in federal court.
