Grazing Improvement Act: Impact on Taxpayers and the Environment

The Grazing Improvement Act of 2013is a controversial piece oflegislationthat could significantly impact both taxpayers and the environment. Sponsored by Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the bill aims to extend the renewal term for public land grazing permits and leases from ten to twenty years. This extension could have far-reaching implications for environmental assessments and taxpayer subsidies.

When an interest group, such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, supports a bill because it will “reduce the paperwork backlog,” it often signals that another group, like American taxpayers, may bear the financial burden.

ThelegislationrecentlylefttheSenateEnergyand Natural Resources Committee and is headed to the Senate floor for a vote. Its primary intention is to amend the Federal LandPolicyandManagementAct of 1976 to extend the renewal term for public land grazing permits and leases from ten to twenty years.

The implications of this extension are substantial. Ranchers currently grazelivestockon 155 million of the 260 million acres administered by theBureau of Land Management(BLM) and the Forest Service. Taxpayers subsidize this activity to the tune of $100 million annually. They do so despite the Center for Biological Diversity’sclaimthat “livestockgrazing wreaks ecological havoc on riparian areas, rivers, deserts, grasslands, and forests alike” and the Forest Service’s admission that grazinglivestockis a major cause of species endangerment.

What the Grazing Improvement Act seeks to accomplish with term extensions involves more than clearing paper backlogs. Notably, the bill helps ranchers who grazepublic landsdelay or even evade critical environmental assessments.

Under current circumstances, an environmentalreviewauthorized by the National EnvironmentalPolicyAct (NEPA) must take place before a grazing permit or lease can be renewed. With term extensions, NEPA assessments would become less frequent and, in many cases,endaltogether.

A letter to theSenateEnergy and Natural Resources Committee signed by fifteen environmental organizations spells out the problem. “The Grazing Improvement Act,” it explained, “would undermine NEPA by automatically renewing expired grazing permits without agency review, doubling the length of grazing permits and leases from 10 to 20 years and may waive entire categories of grazing use from public planning requirements.”

Cattlemen groups, who sent their own letter to the Committee, have a different explanation. They support the proposal because, they write, it “will provide certainty tolivestockproducers—ensuring unnecessary regulations and litigation are not allowed to pull the rug out from under the grazing permits they rely on to provide economic vitality to western communities and open space for wildlife while producing food and fiber for the world.”

In a phone conversation, Dustin Van Liew, executive director of thePublic LandsCouncil for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, suggested that thelegislationwould allow environmental review agencies more time to “focus on areas that need to be analyzed,” noting in particular concerns over endangered species and wild horses.

Jon Marvel, executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, doesn’t buy the beef industry’s line for a second. In an interview, he called the bill “a real problem” due in part to the fact that, as thelegislationis worded, theBLM“could decide an allotment is meeting land use standards without complying with NEPA.” But the real motivation for the bill, as he sees it, centers on the enhancement of rancher collateral.

Banks, Marvel says, “make loans based on the grazing permit itself.” The below market rate that ranchers enjoy, he adds, “transfers equity value into the base property.” Noting that the “permit would have no value if the government charged a market rate,” he explains that, as matters now stand, “the permit as collateral is enhanced by a longer term.” Delay or eliminate the potentially costly results of a NEPA assessment, and the land’s value increases.

In this respect, welfare ranchers subsidized by the federal government to “produce food and fiber for the world”—a dubious claim given that less than 3 percent of U.S. beef comes from cattle on public land—are not so much reducing a paperwork backlog as shifting it.

Perhaps subsidized ranchers really don’t mind paperwork after all, especially the kind with dollar signs all over it.

Originally Posted By Forbes