Who Does the Trumpist War on the Public Lands Serve?
By 
It’s all about the billionaires. And who needs more help that the Kroenke family, who only owns the Los Angeles Rams, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and Arsenal in the Premier League?
Stan Kroenke doesn’t need federal help to make a business flourish. He is worth an estimated $20 billion, a fortune that has allowed him to become one of America’s largest property owners and afforded him stakes in storied sports franchises, including the Denver Nuggets and England’s Arsenal soccer club.
Yet Kroenke, whose wife is an heiress to the Walmart fortune, benefits from one of the federal government’s bedrock subsidy programs.
As owner of the Winecup Gamble Ranch, which sprawls across grasslands, streams and a mountain range east of Elko, Nevada, Kroenke is entitled to graze his cattle on public lands for less than 15% of the fees he would pay on private land. The public-lands grazing program, formalized in the 1930s to contain the rampant overgrazing that contributed to the Dust Bowl, has grown to serve operations including billionaire hobby ranchers, mining companies, utilities and large corporate outfits, providing benefits unimagined by its founding law.
President Donald Trump’s administration plans to make the program even more generous — pushing to open even more of the 240 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service grazing land to livestock while reducing oversight of the environmental damage. This, members of the administration contend, will further its goal of using public lands to fuel the economy and eliminate the national debt.
“That’s the balance sheet of America,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said of federal lands at his confirmation hearing in January, “and, if we were a company, they would look at us and say, ‘Wow, you are really restricting your balance sheet.’”
ProPublica and High Country News set out to investigate the transformation of the grazing system into a massive subsidy program. In the late 1970s, Congress raised the fees to graze on public lands to reflect open market prices at the time. But the fees have barely budged in decades. The government still charges ranchers $1.35 per animal unit month, a 93% discount, on average, on the price of grazing on private lands. (An animal unit month, or AUM, represents the typical amount of forage a cow and her calf eat in a month.)
Our analysis found that in 2024 alone, the federal government poured at least $2.5 billion into subsidy programs that public-lands ranchers can access, not including the steep discount on forage. Subsidies benefiting public-lands ranchers include disaster assistance after droughts and floods, cheap crop insurance, funding for fences and watering holes, and compensation for animals lost to predators.
Benefits flow largely to a select few like Kroenke. Roughly two-thirds of all the livestock grazing on BLM acreage is controlled by just 10% of ranchers, our analysis showed. On Forest Service land, the top 10% of permittees control more than 50% of grazing. This concentration of control has been the status quo for decades. In 1999, the San Jose Mercury News undertook a similar study and found that the largest ranchers controlled the same proportion of grazing within BLM jurisdiction as they do today.
The biggest welfare queens are the biggest baiters of actual people who need welfare.