Reporting Highlights
- Powerful Friends: Well-placed allies, from U.S. senators to county officials, give ranchers leverage against regulators. They’ve sometimes pushed for fewer consequences for rule breakers.
- Chilling Regulators: Multiple current or former BLM and Forest Service employees told us that ranchers’ influential allies make enforcement of grazing regulations politically fraught.
- The Most Influential Ally: Trump is increasing support for ranching and appointing individuals sympathetic to the industry, including some who’ve sued over the enforcement of grazing regulations.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In late 2019, a pair of Montana ranchers got in trouble with the Forest Service, which oversees the federal lands where they had a permit to graze their cattle. Agency staff had found their cattle wandering in unauthorized locations four times during September of that year. The agency also found some of their fences in disrepair and their salt licks — which provide cattle with essential minerals — too close to creeks and springs, drawing the animals into those habitats.
After repeated calls, texts and letters, the Forest Service sent the ranchers a “notice of noncompliance,” according to documents obtained via public records requests. The agency asserted that the ranchers had engaged in “a willful and intentional violation” of their permit and warned that future violations could lead to its revocation.
The ranchers were hardly the largest or most politically influential among those who graze livestock on public lands. But they soon had help from well-placed people as they pushed back, hoping to get the warning rescinded based on their belief that they had been treated unfairly.
“The Forest Service needs to work with us and understand that grazing on the Forest is not black and white,” the ranchers wrote to the agency. The agency’s acting district ranger, for his part, said his staff had “gone above and beyond” to help the ranchers comply with the rules.
With assistance from a former Forest Service employee, the ranchers contacted their congressional representatives in early 2020. Staffers for then-Rep. Greg Gianforte and Sen. Steve Daines, both Republicans, leapt into action, kicking off more than a year of back-and-forth between the senator’s office and Forest Service officials.
“When they hear something they don’t like,” they run to the forest supervisor and the senator’s office “to get what they want,” a Forest Service official wrote in a 2021 email to colleagues.
Public lands ranching is one of the largest land uses in many Western states like Montana, where there are more cattle than people. Politicians have shown themselves remarkably responsive to requests for help from grazing permittees, even those of modest means.
Ranchers who have been cited for violations or who resist regulations have called on pro-grazing lawyers, trade group lobbyists and sympathetic politicians, from county commissioners to state legislators and U.S. senators like Daines. These allies — some of whom now hold positions in the Trump administration — have pushed for looser environmental rules