WASHINGTON— The Trump administration has finalized a plan to bypass environmental reviews and public input in an effort to significantly expand private livestock grazing on America’s national forests and other public lands.

“This is a stunt to cozy up to ranchers the Trump administration burned by driving fuel and fertilizer prices skyward and increasing Argentinian beef imports to prop up a right-wing autocrat,” said Brian Nowicki, deputy Southwest director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The goal is to hand America’s cherished public lands over to the livestock industry at the expense of recreation, wildlife and clean water. These lands are not the administration’s to take away. They belong to all of us.”

Under the plan, released Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service will “expand the use of emergency authorities” to fast-track livestock grazing permits.

The agreement does not explain why faster grazing authorization would qualify as a national “emergency,” given that Congress already allows the agencies to renew grazing permits without environmental review. It would further reduce already limited public involvement in major public land decisions.

The agencies also agree to initiate “ranch immersion and training programs” for federal employees to work for ranchers as part of their duties. It is unclear how agency staff, already reduced in number due to the DOGE cuts, would have time or funding to participate in such programs or embed in ranchers’ private operations. Employment at the Forest Service has fallen by roughly one-third and been cut nearly in half at BLM since 2024.

The agreement calls for accelerating permitting “while improving land health,” despite staffing cuts last year that included agency biologists who monitored land conditions. For years the agencies have allowed land health to decline as a direct result of grazing.

In response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by the Center, a federal court on Tuesday ruled that federal agencies violated the Endangered Species Act by ignoring years of damage from illegal livestock grazing to rare desert stream habitat for imperiled fish and birds within the Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona. In the ruling, the court rejected claims from the BLM and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that unauthorized grazing caused by BLM-permitted cattle was beyond their control.

Cows damage public lands by trampling banks and streambeds, stripping vegetation to bare soil, blocking tree regeneration, and polluting water with feces, urine, sediment and cattle carcasses.

The administration’s beef plan directs agencies to put more cattle on vacant allotments and to maintain current levels on all active ones, regardless of threats to wildlife, water quality or recreation.

The proposal to massively expand grazing in the wild places where carnivores live, without requiring livestock operators to take basic steps to avoid conflict, would likely result in more dead wildlife, particularly predators such as vulnerable grizzlies and wolves.

Across the desert Southwest, livestock grazing harms threatened and endangered wildlife and is the primary driver of riparian ecosystem degradation and species imperilment. Removing livestock from riparian areas is critical to curbing the extinction crisis in the Southwest.