In 2025, President Donald Trump's makeover of the White House has taken on two different forms: (1) tearing down the historic East Wing to make way for a lavish new ballroom, and (2) redecorating parts of the West Wing in a distinctly Trumpian fashion.

The New York Times' Sam Sifton, in a newsletter published on Christmas Eve Day 2025, describes Trump's Oval Office makeover — which, the reporter notes, is so extensive that "he's almost out of wall space."

"He has made it an extravagant room," Sifton observes. "Gold is everywhere: on picture frames and gilded carvings, on seals and antiques and finials. The metal covers about a third of the walls…. Flags are abundant. There are five times as many as most other presidents displayed. A gold-framed copy of the Declaration of Independence hangs to the right of the Resolute Desk."

Sifton's newsletter is accompanied by two photos from the Times' Doug Mills — one showing Joe Biden in the Oval Office during his presidency, the other showing the Oval Office since Trump's return to the White House. And the latter has a lot more gold, which Sifton notes, is "a metaphor the president uses to telegraph his success."

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Times, "He's a maximalist."

Some Trump critics, however, are alleging that the gold in the Oval Office may not be real gold.

Sifton explains, "All the gold — on those mirrors, on the frames of the portraits beside them, in the inlaid seal on the coffee table — has led to rumors that they're just cheap plastic, painted gold. Trump denies it, and a White House official told The Times that while the underlying materials are made of plaster or metal, they are covered in real gold leaf. I dug this detail: A craftsman from Florida regularly travels to the White House to gild parts of the Oval Office by hand, often when the president is away on weekends."

Read Sam Sifton's full New York Times newsletter is available at this link (subscription required).

A report published Wednesday by Greenpeace exposes the plastics industry as “merchants of myth” still peddling the false promise of recycling as a solution to the global pollution crisis, even as the vast bulk of commonly produced plastics remain unrecyclable.

“After decades of meager investments accompanied by misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable, plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable,” the report begins.

“The latest US government data indicates that just 5% of US plastic waste is recycled annually, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014,” the publication continues. “Meanwhile, the amount of single-use plastics produced every year continues to grow, driving the generation of ever greater amounts of plastic waste and pollution.”

Among the report’s findings:

• Only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics—found in items like bottles, jugs, food containers, and caps—are actually recyclable;
• Major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Nestlé have been quietly retracting sustainability commitments while continuing to rely on single-use plastic packaging; and
• The US plastic industry is undermining meaningful plastic regulation by making false claims about the recyclability of their products to avoid bans and reduce public backlash.

“Recycling is a toxic lie pushed by the plastics industry that is now being propped up by a pro-plastic narrative emanating from the White House,” Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director John Hocevar said in a statement. “These corporations and their partners continue to sell the public a comforting lie to hide the hard truth: that we simply have to stop producing so much plastic.”

“Instead of investing in real solutions, they’ve poured billions into public relations campaigns that keep us hooked on single-use plastic while our communities, oceans, and bodies pay the price,” he added.

Greenpeace is among the many climate and environmental groups supporting a global plastics treaty, an accord that remains elusive after six rounds of talks due to opposition from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that produce the petroleum products from which almost all plastics are made.

Honed from decades of funding and promoting dubious research aimed at casting doubts about the climate crisis caused by its products, the petrochemical industry has sent a small army of lobbyists to influence global treaty negotiations.

In addition to environmental and climate harms, plastics—whose chemicals often leach into the food and water people eat and drink—are linked to a wide range of health risks, including infertility, developmental issues, metabolic disorders, and certain cancers.

Plastics also break down into tiny particles found almost everywhere on Earth—including in human bodies—called microplastics, which cause ailments such as inflammation, immune dysfunction, and possibly cardiovascular disease and gut biome imbalance.

A study published earlier this year in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that plastics are responsible for more than $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses worldwide annually—impacts that disproportionately affect low-income and at-risk populations.

As Jo Banner, executive director of the Descendants Project—a Louisiana advocacy group dedicated to fighting environmental racism in frontline communities—said in response to the new Greenpeace report, “It’s the same story everywhere: poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities turned into sacrifice zones so oil companies and big brands can keep making money.”

“They call it development—but it’s exploitation, plain and simple,” Banner added. “There’s nothing acceptable about poisoning our air, water, and food to sell more throwaway plastic. Our communities are not sacrifice zones, and we are not disposable people.”

Writing for Time this week, Judith Enck, a former regional administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency and current president of the environmental justice group Beyond Plastics, said that “throwing your plastic bottles in the recycling bin may make you feel good about yourself, or ease your guilt about your climate impact. But recycling plastic will not address the plastic pollution crisis—and it is time we stop pretending as such.”

“So what can we do?” Enck continued. “First, companies need to stop producing so much plastic and shift to reusable and refillable systems. If reducing packaging or using reusable packaging is not possible, companies should at least shift to paper, cardboard, glass, or metal.”

“Companies are not going to do this on their own, which is why policymakers—the officials we elected to protect us—need to require them to do so,” she added.

Although lawmakers in the 119th US Congress have introduced a handful of bills aimed at tackling plastic pollution, such proposals are all but sure to fail given Republican control of both the House of Representatives and Senate and the Trump administration’s pro-petroleum policies.

Actor Jeff Bridges slammed lawmakers for using the feeding of children as a weapon during the government shutdown Thursday on Jake Tapper's CNN show "The Lead."

"The Big Lebowski" star is an activist primarily known for his work to end childhood hunger and combat plastic pollution. He is a notable member of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and the national spokesperson for Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign since 2010.

"It's so bizarre here in the wealthiest country in the world. We have enough food, we have enough money, we have enough programs to end childhood hunger. To use feeding kids as a weapon going back and forth doesn't make any sense," he said.

An estimated 7.3 million households with children will lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Saturday. Other federal nutrition programs that serve children are also being affected, such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start, which provides early education and development for children.

Bridges is outraged and speaking out No Kid Hungry's national spokesman.

"Billy (Shore, the founder of Share Our Strength) and I have been traveling all over the country talking to governors and mayors in the states themselves, Republicans, Democrats and independents all agree, we should feed our kids," he told Tapper.

"There's no reason not to do that. And to have the feds getting in the way of this thing, talk about bizarre," he added.

The community of “involuntary celibate" men that trend toward President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have had a difficult year.

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte noted Wednesday that the biggest loser of 2025 appears to be the incel movement, which seems to have reached its peak.

Marcotte began with popular MAGA influencer Sólionath, who "[defended] white supremacist murderers, [tried] to get people fired for not mourning Charlie Kirk ... and [concocted] lies about the [Jeffrey] Epstein files."

Sólionath ended his year by bashing the 99 percent of the world that has had sex at some point in their life, claiming that few people have actually ever done it.

Mocking "Nazi apologist" Nick Fuentes, Marcotte recalled the Piers Morgan interview asking if he's ever had sex.

“No, absolutely not,” Fuentes said. He then admitted he finds it "very difficult to be around” women. Any man who does manage to score will end up “henpecked.”

"You think you’re an expert on women, given you never got laid?" Morgan asked.

After a year in office, Trump's MAGA movement is faltering, young white men are bailing in droves and the "incel" world has stumbled into a marketing problem, Marcotte wrote.

“Trumpist leaders love pointing the finger at LGBTQ+ people and liberals, calling them ‘groomers’ and suggesting they’re violent perverts," she continued. "But in 2025, the nation really saw how much that behavior is old-fashioned psychological projection.”

The best example of that comes from the investigation files around sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Marcotte. Trump has spent the past six months frantically trying to stop the release of the "the 5.2 million pages of documents" the government has on the federal investigation into Epstein

"The nation got a glimpse of the sexual world the president apparently inhabited, or at least stood in close proximity to, one which wasn’t glamorous but simply gross," said Marcotte.

“In 2025, ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ entered the lexicon, a term used to describe the combination of plastered-on makeup and aggressive plastic surgery that makes women look like inflatable sex dolls, as Trump’s apparent sexual tastes have morphed MAGA aesthetics into something inhuman," Marcotte continued.

Allthewhile, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and self-appointed "First Buddy," was exposed for having "a fetish for impregnating women."

"It may not initially seem obvious why Mar-a-Lago face, incels, Elon's pregnancy fetish or the Epstein files are linked," wrote Salon's Amanda Marcotte. "But this is a year in which MAGA showed they are very weird about sex. And it's hurting them."

Ultimately, the right wing populates the internet with "sexually dysfunctional straight men who argue that their romantic woes aren’t due to their own failures, but because feminism has ‘ruined’ women," Marcotte closed. “Either way, there’s one thing I can predict with confidence: We’ll get another round of articles handwringing about why it’s so hard for Republicans to find a date, which will show no understanding that the answer was always obvious.”

Read the full column here.

A woman who voted for President Donald Trump three times is now leading the challenge to his sweeping tariffs, saying Trump has exceeded his authority, according to The New York Times.

Sara Albrecht heads the Liberty Justice Center, a right-leaning legal organization representing an "ideologically diverse" coalition of businesses that has sued over the legality of Trump's tarriff policy.

"The role of her group, the Liberty Justice Center, underscores just how much the tariff issue has divided conservatives," the Times reports.

In 2018, the group brought a case to the Supreme Court that resulted in the justices’ ruling "that public sector workers could not be required to pay collective bargaining fees. The case was a major blow to labor unions that had raised millions from the fees," according to the Times.

The group has filed close to 140 lawsuits since 2011, and "the group has also fought policies that prohibit schools from sharing information with parents about their child’s gender identity," the Times explains.

Albrecht told the Times that her group had already been "exploring filing cases that challenged what it considered executive branch overreach" in February when Trump first invoked an emergency statute from the 1970s to unilaterally impose the taxes on imported goods.

Liberty Justice Center then joined forces with a law professor to recruit five small businesses as plaintiffs in the case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

“We knew the businesses were going to have to represent all of America’s small businesses,” Albrecht told the Times, “and we really needed an easy story to tell.”

The businesses include a wine importer, educational electronic kit manufacturer, a women’s biking apparel business, a plastic pipe maker and a specialty fishing tackle company.

Arguing the case are two prominent attorneys, one conservative and one liberal—Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge nominated by President George W. Bush and Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general during President Barack Obama’s terms.

“I thought the Republicans were against tariffs. It never really occurred to me that this would be an issue that I would be fighting a Republican president on," said Jeffrey M. Schwab, the group’s senior counsel.

Albrecht added that it's not as much about Trump as it is about the rule of law.

“It’s about the presidency, not about the president, and it’s about the Constitution,” she said. “We’ve made it about the separation of powers, and that applies to everybody, whether you voted for him or not.”

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a decade. It’s not because of my health, or because I dislike the taste of chicken or beef: It’s a lifestyle choice I made because I wanted to reduce my impact on the planet. And yet, twice a day, every day, I lovingly scoop a cup of meat-based kibble into a bowl and set it down for my 50-pound rescue dog, a husky mix named Loki.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Until recently, I hadn’t devoted a huge amount of thought to that paradox. Then I read an article in the Associated Press headlined “People often miscalculate climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog.”

The study, led by environmental psychology researcher Danielle Goldwert and published in the journal PNAS Nexus, examined how people perceive the climate impact of various behaviors — options like “adopt a vegan diet for at least one year,” or “shift from fossil fuel car to renewable public transport.” The team found that participants generally overestimated a number of low-impact actions like recycling and using efficient appliances, and they vastly underestimated the impact of other personal decisions, including the decision to “not purchase or adopt a dog.”

The real objective of the study was to see whether certain types of climate information could help people commit to more effective actions. But mere hours after the AP published its article, its aim had been recast as something else entirely: an attack on people’s furry family members. “Climate change is actually your fault because you have a dog,” one Reddit user wrote. Others in the community chimed in with ire, ridiculing the idea that a pet Chihuahua could be driving the climate crisis and calling on researchers and the media to stop pointing fingers at everyday individuals.

Goldwert and her fellow researchers watched the reactions unfold with dismay. “If I saw a headline that said, ‘Climate scientists want to take your dogs away,’ I would also feel upset,” she said. “They definitely don’t,” she added. “You can quote me on that.”

The study set out to understand how to shift behavior by communicating climate truths. Instead, its media coverage revealed a troubling psychological trade-off: When climate-related messaging strikes a nerve, it may actually turn people off from the work of shifting societal norms.

It’s an instinct I understand on some level. I love Loki, and my knee-jerk reaction is to defend the very personal choice of sharing one’s life with a dog. I also sympathize with redirecting the blame toward the biggest polluters: billionaires and fossil fuel companies (not Bon-Bon, the pet Chihuahua in question). But is it irresponsible to shrug off any conversation about the environmental impact of our pets — something far more within our control than, say, the overthrow of capitalism?

Is there a way to have a frank discussion about the climate impact of our personal lives without it going to the dogs?

Oftentimes, when I’m questioning how a particular climate behavior might fit into my life, I try to imagine how it looks in my vision of a sustainable future. It’s why, for instance, I don’t own a car and am dedicated to riding public transit, even though it isn’t always super convenient. I’m keen to be an early adopter of systems I believe in. But I struggle to imagine a future without companion animals, even knowing about their environmental impact — which is admittedly substantial.

Dogs and cats eat meat-heavy diets, which is where the bulk of their carbon pawprint comes from. A 2017 study from UCLA found that dogs and cats are responsible for about 25 to 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the United States. That’s equivalent to a year’s worth of driving by 13.6 million cars. For pets that eat traditional kibble or wet food, that protein may come from meat byproducts — otherwise-wasted animal parts, such as organs and bones, not approved for human consumption. But an increasing number of pet owners are opting to feed their fur babies “human-grade” meat products, which requires additional resources and generates extra emissions.

After they eat, of course, they poop. A lot. At least for dogs, that poop typically gets bagged in plastic and sent to the landfill. And it turns out all the biodegradable poop bags I’ve diligently bought over the years don’t help matters much; they also release greenhouse gases in landfills, and most composting programs don’t accept pet waste.

With more dogs around than ever before — the U.S. dog population has steadily increased from 52.9 million in 1996 to a new peak of 89.7 million in 2024 — their overall climate toll is more than a Chihuahua-sized issue. But pets are also more than just sources of carbon pollution. According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, 97 percent of owners say they consider their pets to be part of their families, with 51 percent of respondents saying they are on the same level as a human family member. So whenever their climate impact crops up in the discourse, as it has periodically, it makes sense that people tend to get defensive.

For some climate advocates, the solution has been to shift messaging away from individual responsibility and focus instead on big, systemic changes like overhauling our electricity and transit systems through governmental investment in clean energy. In her essay “I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle,” author and podcaster Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote: “The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous … It’s victim blaming, plain and simple.”

Heglar and others have taken a strong stance against environmental purity — the idea that you can’t care about or advocate for systems-level change if you aren’t first changing your own habits. But not everyone agrees that individual actions should be completely deemphasized in the climate conversation. Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist and author of the popular book Under the Sky We Make, has argued that wealthy people living in wealthy countries — and globally, “wealthy” is a lower bar than you might think — do have a responsibility to slash their outsize carbon emissions. And particularly for those of us living in democracies, personal action isn’t just about the choices we make as consumers.

“There’s still an ongoing tension between personal and system change, or individual and collective action,” Nicholas said. “It’s really hard to get that right — to get the right balance there that acknowledges the role and the importance of both, and to talk about and study and describe both in a way that motivates people to take high-impact actions.”

Goldwert saw that tension play out in her maligned climate communications study. In the experiment, participants reviewed 21 individual climate actions (like eating less meat) and five systemic actions (like voting) and rated their commitments to taking each action. Two test groups then received clarifying information about the relative impact of the 21 individual actions — one group was asked to estimate their ranking before learning how they actually ranked, the other group received the information straight-up. But participants didn’t receive any data about the carbon-mitigation potential of the five collective actions, which would be far more difficult to quantify.

What Goldwert’s team found surprised them: The teachings did nudge people toward higher-impact personal actions, but their stated likelihood of engaging in collective ones actually went down — a backfire effect that hints at the perils of focusing too much on personal lifestyle choices.

“It might be kind of like a mental substitution,” Goldwert said. “People feel like, ‘OK, I’ve done my part individually. I kind of checked the box on climate action.’”

Participants were also asked to rate the “plasticity” of each of the actions, or how easy it would be to adopt. And those measurements revealed another nuance in how people view different forms of climate action. For the individual-focused options, participants were more likely to commit to actions they saw as requiring little effort. For the systemic actions, they were more interested in whether it would have an impact — something researchers are still working on quantifying.

“If you think voting or marching is just symbolic or ineffective, you’re not going to engage,” Goldwert said. “We have to show people evidence that their voice or their vote can shift policy, corporate practices, or social norms.”

I, for one, was surprised to see that participants rated the commitment to “not purchase or adopt a dog” as easy. When I asked Goldwert what might be behind that, she noted that dog ownership is a decision people don’t make very often. It also doesn’t require any action at all for people who already don’t own dogs. The results surely would have been different if the listed action was “get rid of your existing dog.” (Which it was not — a point that readers seemed to miss, based on Reddit comments about the study and the “crazy emails” Goldwert said she received.)

Still, for an animal lover like me, the idea of never adopting another dog doesn’t feel easy to commit to at all. It feels like an immense sacrifice. The sadness I feel at the thought of a future without dogs points me to another important factor when it comes to motivation for climate action: joy.

Actions we take to try and mitigate the climate crisis may be partially driven by how easy they are for us or how effective we believe them to be — but any choice we make is also driven by what we find joy in. It’s an essential part of staying committed and resilient in the fight for a better future. In this way, carbon-intensive activities like dog ownership have value beyond their weight in emissions.

“People have an emotional attachment to the people and animals and creatures that we love,” Nicholas said. “And that is actually, I think, very powerful. We’re not only going to solve climate change by lining up all the numbers — we certainly need to do that, but we have to tap into what people really care about and realize all those things are on the line and threatened by the amount of climate change we’re heading for with current policies.”

Would I fight to ensure that dogs, like my beloved Loki, can continue wagging happily on this planet? Heck yes, I would. I’ve always felt that being a pet person goes hand-in-hand with a sense of altruism and responsibility. And if not giving up our pets means fighting climate change by voting, marching, donating, advocating, and consuming like our pets’ lives depend on it, I think we can all get on board.

That might also mean adjusting our pets’ diets. While making my dog a full vegetarian seems challenging (though technically possible), just cutting out beef has a significant impact — shifting to “lower-carbon meats” was even one of the high-impact actions included in Goldwert’s study. That’s one Loki can easily commit to. And we already buy insect-based treats, which leave a pungent odor in my pockets but seem to please his taste buds.

There are also ways that dog ownership intersects with other climate-related behaviors. Anecdotally, I would say I travel less because I have a dog whose care I need to think about. Walking him every day has also made me vastly more connected to my local environment, the goings-on in my neighborhood, and my neighbors themselves — all of which are important aspects of building climate resilience. Some dogs have even been trained to sniff out invasive species and help identify environmental contaminants. (Not Loki, who has never worked a day in his life.)

Though I’d never thought about it quite this way before I read Goldwert’s study, the climate actions I take have a lot to do with the love I feel for Loki. Not because I want to leave a better world for him — I recognize the reality that I will almost certainly outlive him — but because my feelings for him bring me closer to the love I feel for all living things on this planet. This “ice age predator” who shares my home, as the anthropologist and comedian David Ian Howe puts it, is a living reminder of the relationship humans have with other species, going back many thousands of years.

As the saying goes, “Be the person your dog thinks you are.” And next time you get a little worked up about the realities of the climate crisis and your accountability within it, consider taking yourself on a walk.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/the-climate-paradox-of-having-a-dog/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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, one that props up ranching in the West.

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, established to prevent abuse of public lands, 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 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.

Meanwhile, as we previously reported, the agencies’ oversight of livestock’s environmental impact has declined dramatically in recent years. Lawmakers have allowed an increasing number of grazing permits to be automatically renewed, even when environmental reviews have not been completed or the land has been flagged as being in poor condition.

The Trump administration’s push to further underwrite the livestock industry supports ranchers like Kroenke, whose Winecup Gamble is advertised as covering nearly 1 million acres. More than half of that is federal public land that can support roughly 9,000 head of cattle, according to an advertisement in brokerage listings. Last year, Kroenke paid the government about $50,000 in grazing fees to use the BLM land around the ranch — an 87% discount on the market rate, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis of government data. Previous owners enjoyed similar economic benefits. Before Kroenke, the ranch belonged to Paul Fireman, the longtime CEO of Reebok, who used losses from companies affiliated with the ranch as a $22 million tax writeoff between 2003 and 2018, internal IRS data shows. And before Fireman, it was owned by others, including Hollywood superstar Jimmy Stewart of “It’s a Wonderful Life” fame.

The land where Kroenke runs his cattle has been degraded by overgrazing, according to the BLM.

Kroenke’s representatives did not return messages seeking comment. Fireman declined to comment.

The Trump administration’s retooling of this system is being worked out behind closed doors. In May, the BLM sent a draft of proposed revisions to federal grazing regulations — what would be the first updates to them since the 1990s — to the U.S. Department of the Interior, according to communications reviewed by ProPublica and High Country News.

In October, the administration released a 13-page “plan to fortify the American Beef Industry.” In addition to instructing the BLM and Forest Service to amend grazing regulations, including those that govern how ranchers obtain permits to graze their herds and how environmental damage from their animals is assessed, the plan called for taxpayers to further underwrite ranching by increasing existing subsidies for drought and wildfire relief, for livestock killed by predators and for government-backed insurance.

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, “Livestock grazing is not only a federally and statutorily recognized appropriate land use, but a proven land management tool, one that reduces invasive species and wildfire risk, enhances ecosystem health, and supports rural stewardship.”

In a statement, a BLM spokesperson said that the agency’s mandate includes “sustaining a healthy and economically viable grazing program that benefits rural communities, supports America’s ranching heritage, and promotes responsible stewardship of public lands. The grazing program plays an important role in local economies and land management, providing tools to reduce wildfire risk, manage invasive species, and maintain open landscapes.”

Ranchers say that taxpayers benefit from helping them continue their work, since public lands grazing can prevent private land from being sold and paved over. Bill Fales and his family run a ranch in western Colorado that has been in his wife’s family for more than a century, and their cattle graze in the nearby White River National Forest. “The wildlife here is dependent on these ranches staying as open ranch land,” he said. As development elsewhere carves up habitat, Fales said, the public and private lands his cattle graze are increasingly shared by elk, bears, mountain lions and other species.

Ranchers and their advocates also point to the livestock industry’s production of meat, leather and wool. And as a pillar of rural economies, ranching preserves a uniquely American way of life.

The major trade groups representing public lands ranchers did not respond to requests for comment.

While the country loses money on public lands ranching, both ranchers and critics of the system agree on one thing: Without subsidies, many smaller operators would go out of business.

Settlers covered much of the West with cattle beginning in the mid-1800s, spurred by laws and incentives meant to realize the country’s “manifest destiny.” As the nation expanded, settlers, with the backing of the federal government and the military, seized the Indigenous land that would later be called the public domain.

Unchecked grazing followed.

“On the Western slope of Colorado and in nearby States I saw waste, competition, overuse, and abuse of valuable ranges and watersheds eating into the very heart of Western economy,” observed Rep. Edward Taylor, a Colorado Democrat, as Congress was considering how to properly manage grazing in the 1930s. “The livestock industry, through circumstances beyond its control, was headed for self-strangulation.”

So, in 1934, as Depression-era dust storms darkened the skies over the Great Plains, worsened by overgrazing that denuded grasslands, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Taylor Grazing Act, named for the lawmaker. It divided much of the public domain into parcels, called allotments, and established a permit system to lease them a decade at a time.

Congress modernized laws governing public lands in 1976 with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which required federal agencies to balance competing uses, such as grazing, mining, timber, oil drilling and recreation. Two years later, Congress passed a law that brought grazing fees in line with the value of forage on the open market at the time.

Today, ranching interest groups justify their subsidies by arguing that their livestock feed the country. According to Agriculture Department research, ranching on federal lands accounts for $3.3 billion in economic output annually and supports nearly 50,000 jobs.

But grazing on public lands sustains just 2% of the nation’s beef cattle while accounting for a vanishingly small proportion of the country’s agriculture industry.

ProPublica and High Country News’ analysis found that the government support disproportionately benefits the largest ranchers, who account for a majority of the public-land grazing.

The J.R. Simplot Co. is the largest rancher on BLM land. Founded as a family business in Idaho nearly a century ago, it made a fortune in part by selling potatoes to McDonald’s. The business has since ballooned into a multinational agricultural conglomerate. J.R. Simplot benefits significantly from subsidized forage, paying $2.4 million below market rate to graze nearly 150,000 animal unit months on federal lands last year, according to an analysis of BLM and Forest Service data.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Industrywide, the $21 million collected from ranchers by the BLM and Forest Service was about $284 million below market rate for forage last year.

Fales, the Colorado rancher, relies on access to cheaper forage on federal land. To him, it makes sense that grazing there is less expensive. “Private leases are almost always more productive land,” he said. And unlike private leases, public leases typically require ranchers to pay for the maintenance of infrastructure like fences and water tanks beyond what land management agencies fund.

The full cost to taxpayers, including grazing’s impact on the land, is unknown.

Even before Trump began to aggressively downsize the federal workforce, it was impossible for agencies’ limited staff to monitor the public lands for environmental damage from excessive grazing. The number of BLM rangeland managers fell by 39% from 2019 through 2024, according to the most recent Office of Personnel Management data. By June 2025, after the Trump administration spurred a mass exodus from the federal workforce, the number had shrunk by another 9%, according to internal BLM employment data.

Now, each rangeland manager is responsible for an average of 716 square miles, making it impossible for them to inspect their entire territory every year, BLM employees said.

For many of the country’s largest ranchers, the benefits of running cattle on public lands extend beyond profits from selling beef.

In June, Air Force Two landed in Butte, Montana, where Vice President JD Vance transferred to a motorcade of black SUVs that shuttled him south to a sprawling cattle operation near Yellowstone National Park. Vance had traveled to this remote ranch to meet with its owner — Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire founder of Fox News.

In 2021, Murdoch purchased the Beaverhead Ranch for $200 million from a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the conglomerate controlled by conservative billionaire Charles Koch. Peggy Rockefeller Dulany, an heir to the Rockefeller fortune, owns a massive ranch nearby. Dulany’s ranch did not respond to a request for comment.

“This is a profound responsibility,” Murdoch told The Wall Street Journal through a spokesperson when he bought the ranch. “We feel privileged to assume ownership of this beautiful land and look forward to continually enhancing both the commercial cattle business and the conservation assets across the ranch.”

Ultrawealthy families like the Murdochs, Kochs and Rockefellers own cattle ranches for a variety of reasons. Some want a taste of cowboy-themed luxury or the status gained from controlling vast and beautiful landscapes.

For some, it’s also good business. Even hobby ranches qualify for big property tax breaks in certain jurisdictions. Business expenses related to ranching can be deducted from federal taxes. And federal agencies assign grazing permits to the owners of nearby private ranches, called “base properties,” inflating the value of those properties and making them stable long-term investments. Real estate agents touted Murdoch’s ranch as encompassing 340,000 acres, but two-thirds of that land is public and leased from the Forest Service and BLM.

As with Kroenke’s operation, taxpayers help underwrite grazing at Murdoch’s ranch.

Beaverhead paid less than $25,000, 95% below market rate, to graze on federal lands last year, according to an analysis of agency data.

At least one of Beaverhead’s BLM allotments in the picturesque Centennial Valley — a several-thousand-acre parcel known as Long Creek AMP — is failing environmental standards as a result of grazing. Matador Ranch and Cattle, which was formed from the aggregation of Beaverhead and a smaller ranch purchased by Murdoch in 2021, declined to comment for this story.

Public lands grazing can also help advance unrelated businesses.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves the Las Vegas Valley, is continually searching for new sources of water. Beginning in the 2000s, the utility purchased land hundreds of miles from Las Vegas in order to acquire its groundwater rights. Those properties were associated with public lands grazing permits, which the utility inherited. Bronson Mack, the water authority’s spokesperson, said in a statement that it continues the grazing operation as part of its “maintenance and management of property assets, ranch assets, and environmental resources in the area.”

Mining companies are among the biggest public lands ranchers, in part because grazing permits afford them greater control over areas near their mines. Copper-mining companies like Freeport-McMoRan, Hudbay Minerals and Rio Tinto all run large cattle operations in Arizona, for example.

A Hudbay representative sent a statement that said, “Ranching and mining have coexisted in Arizona for generations, and we operate both with the same commitment to land stewardship and care for our neighboring communities.” The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Nevada Gold Mines, which owns 11 ranches surrounding its northern Nevada operations, is the behemoth of the group. A joint venture between the world’s two largest gold mining companies, the company holds millions of acres of grazing permits.

“We own them for access,” explained Chris Jasmine, the company’s manager of biodiversity and rangelands. “Access to mineral rights, water rights and mitigation credits.”

Many of Nevada Gold Mines’ grazing permits surround its open pits, including the largest gold mining complex in the world. Access to that land makes it easier for the company to participate in programs that give it credits in exchange for environmental restoration projects. Then, the company can either sell these credits to other companies or use them to offset its environmental impacts and expand its mines.

Jeff Burgess, who tracks public lands grazing subsidies via a website he calls the Arizona Grazing Clearinghouse, said such massive government assistance provides little benefit to taxpayers.

“When does the spigot stop? When do we stop throwing away money?” asked Burgess, who wants to see subsidies shrink. “It’s a tyranny of the minority.”

In central Nevada’s Reese River Valley, a redbrick farmhouse that once served as the headquarters of the Hess Ranch has been reduced to crumbling chimneys and shattered windows. Despite its dilapidated appearance, this ranch is one of the private base properties that has allowed a little-known company called BTAZ Nevada to assemble a livestock empire that stretches across roughly 4,000 square miles of public lands, according to a Western Watersheds Project analysis of BLM and Forest Service data.

This empire illustrates the livestock industry’s consolidation, the subsidies that prop it up and the environmental harm that often follows.

Based in Fremont, Nebraska, BTAZ belongs to the Barta family, which owns Sav-Rx, an online provider of prescription medication. The contact phone number BTAZ provided to the BLM is a Sav-Rx customer service line. The family patriarch, Jim Barta, was convicted in 2013 on felony charges for conspiracy to commit bribery. (The conviction was overturned after a judge ruled that Barta had been subjected to entrapment. Barta has since died.)

The Bartas’ operation, now among the largest beneficiaries of the public lands grazing system, includes permits in Nevada, Oregon and Nebraska. Last year, BTAZ paid the government $86,000, $679,000 less than the market rate, according to agency data.

In the Toiyabe Range of Nevada, where BTAZ’s BLM and Forest Service grazing allotments border each other, cow feces covered the ground surrounding a stock tank fed by mountain streams. A dead raven floated on the water’s surface. The BLM listed allotments in this area as failing land health standards due to grazing in 2020 and again in 2024.

Higher in the mountains, the evidence of BTAZ’s grazing was even clearer: swaths of ground chewed and trampled bare, discarded plastic piping, cow feces and bones in an unfenced creek. Streams like these were once suitable habitat for native Lahontan cutthroat trout. But activities such as grazing and development have degraded so much habitat that the threatened species now occupies only 12% of its historical range, according to a 2023 survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“This is completely unnecessary,” Paul Ruprecht, Nevada director of the Western Watersheds Project, said as he surveyed the damage. “It’s not supporting the local economy, at least in any major way; it’s not providing significant amounts of food for anyone; it’s being heavily subsidized at every turn by taxpayers; it’s not adding anything to the scenery or the wildlife.”

BTAZ did not respond to requests for comment.

Smaller ranchers have access to most of the same subsidies as the wealthiest ranchers, but the money isn’t enough to protect them from harsh economic headwinds.

Roughly 18,000 permittees graze livestock on BLM or Forest Service land. The bottom half accounts for less than 4% of the animal unit months on BLM land and less than 10% on Forest Service land, an analysis of the agencies’ data found.

The smaller operations lack the economies of scale available to larger corporations, making it difficult for them to survive on agriculture’s thin profit margins. They’re also more vulnerable to shifting conditions on the ground. Climate change has strained their water supplies. And more than 70,000 wild horses and burros now compete with livestock for forage.

Consolidation in the meatpacking industry is further squeezing ranchers. The four largest operations have taken over more than 80% of the market, giving them leverage to lower the prices paid to ranchers.

Burgess, who tracks public lands grazing subsidies in Arizona, argues the federal government should stop supporting ranchers who would otherwise go out of business. “They refuse to face the reality that a lot of people aren’t going to be able to raise cattle profitably, so they’re just throwing money at it,” he said, calling the system “a vestige of the past.”

That could have ripple effects, shuttering businesses in rural towns. It could also force small ranchers to sell their private land — perhaps to developers who would build on the open spaces, perhaps to wealthy owners like Kroenke or BTAZ.

Mike and Danna Camblin run a small cattle operation near the Yampa River in northwest Colorado. Years of drought have forced them to downsize their herd, while each year they must tie up much of their money in their operation until they can sell their animals. Even with beef prices breaking records, they couldn’t turn a profit without subsidized drought insurance and other government support — including the ability to graze cheaply on federal land.

“Most of these BLM leases have been in the family for years and years, and, if you take care of it, the BLM will allow you to continue to stay,” he said. If they lose their federal grazing permits or otherwise can’t make the economics work, the Camblins might have to sell their private land. Mike has mixed feelings about the influence of government assistance on his industry, saying it “tethers us to those subsidies.”

“That’s where they screwed up, they started subsidizing a lot of these guys clear back in the Dust Bowl,” Mike said of the biggest ranches. Some larger operators who don’t need government assistance take advantage of the system, he said, speaking favorably of an income-based metric that limits richer producers’ access to certain agricultural subsidies.

Smaller ranchers’ precarious financial situation can lead to environmental harm, as they may run too many livestock for too long on federal land where grazing is cheaper.

The Camblins make environmental stewardship part of their operation — monitoring soil and plant health and rotating their several hundred head of cattle among pastures to let the ground rest — but that adds costs.

“A cow turd will tell you more than anything else,” Mike remarked as he eyed a fresh one left by his cattle. If it’s flat, that means the cow is getting enough protein from the grass, he said. If it degrades rapidly, that means insects are attracted to the plentiful organic matter. “I spend more time looking down than at the cattle.”

Technology helps them rotate their herds. Danna’s smartphone displayed a satellite view of the area. The interface showed purple cow icons confined within red polygons — virtual fences that shock the cattle via collars should they stray. Unlike physical fences, virtual fences don’t get in the way of migrating wildlife, and the Camblins can redraw them in an instant to shift their cattle to less-grazed areas.

Leasing the collars for the system cost nearly $18,000 last year, Mike said.

Silvia Secchi, a University of Iowa economist who studies agriculture, said federal grazing subsidies need to be reimagined so they benefit the American public instead of enriching the wealthiest ranchers. She suggested potential solutions like subsidizing co-ops that allow smaller ranchers to access economies of scale, capping the size of ranching operations that pay below market rate for forage and ending disaster payments for climate change-fueled droughts that are here to stay.

“We have baseline subsidies that are going up and up and up because we are not telling farmers to change the way you do things to adapt,” Secchi said.

Secchi and the Camblins agree that ending all public support would have repercussions for rural communities and landscapes. Mike acknowledged it could put his and Danna’s operation at risk.

“You’re going to lose your small rancher,” he said.