Rangeland Management

Domestic livestock graze almost 270 million acres of federal land in the western United States. The impact of such grazing, which dates to the 1800s, is a matter of increasing concern to Congress. While the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has done the required monitoring of range conditions, it has decided appropriate grazing levels for only about 20 percent of the 14,500 allotments covered by environmental impact statements issued more than 5 years ago. Further, it has not monitored about 7,200 allotments at all. For the allotments it has monitored, BLM has generally not analyzed the data or decided on appropriate grazing levels. BLM range managers cite staff shortages and higher priority work as important reasons why the monitoring has not been more extensive. GAO's findings are consistent with those in earlier reports on BLM's rangeland management program. These reports pointed out that BLM is hampered in its ability to protect rangelands from grazing damage and to restore damaged lands because of insufficient funding and staff.

GAO found that: (1) BLM has only collected monitoring data for half of the 14,000 allotments that it should have completed within the last 5 years; (2) although BLM focused its limited monitoring attention on high priority allotments, it did not complete required monitoring within the required 5-year time frame for more than 300 allotments; (3) for 14 percent of the allotments BLM collected long-term trend data, but not the more specific short-term data needed to identify specific corrective actions; (4) BLM has not used its monitoring data to change grazing levels or practices; (5) BLM range managers attribute their inability to perform required monitoring and utilize data to staff shortages and the need to perform higher priority range management tasks; and (6) BLM grazing management decisions have lacked adequate documentation to support them.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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