It costs the Bureau of Land Management more than $100 million a year to house, feed and provide medical care for the wild horses and burros currently in corrals and off-range pastures across the West and Midwest.
That eye-popping price tag is the result of a strategy to regularly round up and remove a portion of mustangs off federal rangelands, which is meant to control the population and protect increasingly sensitive lands from being overrun by growing herd sizes.
By one key measure, the approach — initially implemented by the first Trump administration and continued under former President Joe Biden — is a success. The number of free-roaming wild horses and burros on federal land is now at the lowest level in nearly a decade, making it easier for the bureau to protect soils, vegetation and already scarce water resources the animals need to survive.
But at a time when the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are looking for cuts across the federal budget, the huge expense of caring for the 68,143 wild horses and burros held by BLM as of January underscores just how tough it can be for agencies to find savings.
Even as BLM approaches the maximum number of animals that can be kept at its facilities, the bureau believes there are still nearly 50,000 excess horses and burros on the range. Other policy choices — such as dramatically ramping up fertility control measures — come with their own complications, while likely also requiring congressional buy-in.
“In short, the current situation is not sustainable, and there are no easy, viable, quickly implementable solutions,” said Dean Bolstad, the former division chief of the wild horse and burro program who retired from BLM during Trump’s first term in 2018.
This is the third year the cost to care for and feed wild horses — often considered an enduring symbol of the West — is likely to top $100 million, consuming roughly two-thirds of BLM’s $142 million annual budget for the program in fiscal 2025.
While BLM adopts out 5,000 to 7,000 wild horses in its care annually, the agency rounds up and removes close to three times that number in some years.
Many advocates for wild horses have decried BLM’s roundups — which often involve using helicopters to gather the animals and can result in some horses being fatally injured. While they acknowledge some herd management areas are overcrowded, they support leaving them on the range and controlling populations with birth control.
Suzanne Roy, executive director of American Wild Horse Conservation, wants to see BLM adopt a strategy of on-range fertility control treatments that would eliminate the enormous costs of holding so many animals.
“The agency must shift to real solutions: humane large-scale fertility control to stop the influx of horses to holding facilities, and for captive horses, promoting responsible adoptions, utilizing cost-effective long-term pastures, and returning them to wild habitats” once populations have been reduced to sufficient numbers, Roy said.
As it stands now, she said, BLM’s wild horse and burro program “is a runaway fiscal disaster, wasting taxpayer dollars on mass roundups that don’t work.”
A partial success
For BLM, the roundup strategy has been largely successful in meeting the goal of bringing down the number of animals in the wild. At the time it began during the first Trump administration, horse populations had grown to record levels. Mustang herds were trampling rangelands, consuming scarce water and forage at a rate that raised concerns about mass die-offs due to lack of resources.
BLM reported last week that its annual count of wild horses and burros shows a total range-wide population of 73,130 animals as of March 1. While that’s a dip of fewer than 400 animals compared to last year’s count of 73,520, it still represents the lowest number in eight years.
While BLM says there are still more than 47,000 excess wild horses and burros — well above the limit the agency estimates the rangelands can sustain without causing damage to soils, water and vegetation — the latest estimates “represent continued progress towards reducing chronic overpopulation and protecting the long-term health of the wild horse and burro herds and the land they depend on,” a BLM spokesperson said in an emailed statement to POLITICO’s E&E News.
But the roundups are exacerbating the decades-old problem associated with the costs to care for and feed the thousands of federally protected animals.
Jim Sedinger, the western section council member for the Wildlife Society, a group of more than 11,000 wildlife professionals that has studied the problem, said he agrees the current strategy BLM is using is financially exorbitant. Despite the investment, however, Sedinger cautioned it will not result in bringing populations down to the roughly 26,000 number that BLM has said is its target.
Factoring in that wild horse herds can double every four years, Congress needs to dramatically increase funding to allow BLM to increase roundups and removals of more than 20,000 animals a year, for perhaps the next five or so years, to get populations down to the appropriate management level, said Sedinger, a retired wildlife professor from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Once that is done, he said, “with the fertility control drugs that are available right now, you have a sustainable program.”
Sedinger said that BLM must be given the ability to take steps that both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have prevented in recent years: euthanize horses that can’t be adopted and allow horses to be sold for slaughter.
Those steps would be allowed under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, but Congress since 2007 has included provisions in annual Interior Department appropriations bills that prohibit those actions.
Bolstad, who said he doesn’t support euthanizing horses, noted the political support for the animals makes it unlikely the current policy would be changed.
“Socially, humane organizations and wild horse advocates have enough influence to prevent the disposition of unadoptable animals through any means other than placement in humane private care,” Bolstad said.
BLM needs to try anyway, Sedinger said.
“There’s a solution, but it’s going to require that Congress remove riders on appropriations bills about transferring or selling some of these horses for slaughter or whatever, so that BLM isn’t responsible for maintaining these horses for the rest of their lives,” he said.
Adoption conundrum
Complicating matters for BLM is the fact that its best option to place the captured animals into private care — an incentive program that offers $1,000 for each adopted animal — is now on indefinite hold after a federal court this month determined it violates federal law.
Senior Judge William J. Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the District of Coloradoruled that protection measures BLM implemented three years ago to ensure that thousands of animals that have gone through the program are not later sold to slaughter by their new owners are insufficient to safeguard the animals.
American Wild Horse Conservation was the lead plaintiff in that lawsuit, which was sparked in part by records gathered by wild horse advocates that were detailed in a 2021 New York Times story that estimated “truckloads” of adopted wild horses and burros were later sold at auction. BLM says it has found no credible evidence that any adopted animal ended up at slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada.
“The Adoption Incentive Program is currently paused and not available for new adopters,” according to a recent post on BLM’s adoption incentive program webpage. “The BLM will provide additional information as soon as possible.”
The program’s loss, even if temporary, is a huge blow to the bureau’s efforts to manage wild horse and burro populations, said Tate Watkins, a research fellow at Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a free-market think tank.
PERC says the program has helped reduce costs, reporting last year that an analysis it conducted found the program saved an estimated $66 million in costs to taxpayers if the animals adopted since the program started in 2019 were still being held in BLM off-range corrals and pastures.
Watkins, who co-authored the report, said “it’s foolish to take away tools” that help BLM control overpopulation herd management areas.
“Without the Adoption Incentive Program, it will be harder for the agency to address the ecological and fiscal challenges of the situation,” he said. “We firmly believe reinstating the program will be essential to resolving this problem and improving rangeland health.”
Capture and removal
BLM did not respond to questions about whether it plans to change its roundup and adoption strategy, and whether the effort to capture and remove excess animals is financially sustainable.
BLM spent $101 million of its $142 million Wild Horse & Burro Program fiscal 2024 budget on “off-range holding costs.”
BLM last year gathered and removed 16,000 wild horses and burros from federal rangelands.
BLM’s fiscal 2025 wild horse and burro roundup schedule, which began Oct. 1, 2024, and runs through September, estimates the bureau will conduct roundups, including emergency or “nuisance gathers,” where there is not enough water or forage, to remove about 11,000 animals.
Roy said in her statement that the ongoing cycle of wild horse roundups and long-term holding costing the agency tens of millions of dollars a year is “a crisis of their own making.”
“The agency must shift to real solutions: humane large-scale fertility control to stop the influx of horses to holding facilities, and for captive horses, promoting responsible adoptions, utilizing cost-effective long-term pastures, and returning them to wild habitats” once the populations have been reduced to appropriate levels, she said.
BLM over the past few years has adopted a strategy of separating a certain number of captured mares during each roundup, treating them with fertility controls and releasing them back onto the range.
The bureau applied more than 1,000 fertility control treatments to wild mares last year, according to bureau documents. But the most widely available fertility control vaccines require multiple applications and are mostly temporary, and doing so is incredibly difficult for thousands of animals spread across millions of acres.
BLM began to focus on capture and removal in 2019.
Since that time, total populations declined from a record 95,114 in 2020 to 73,130 as of March 1 — a 23 percent decrease.
Wild horse populations alone decreased by 8.7 percent between 2024 and 2025, to 53,797 from 58,952, according to bureau data.
“The estimated wild horse population saw a measured decline compared to 2024, reflecting the BLM’s increased efforts to reduce overpopulation through expanded removals and more effective fertility control treatments,” BLM said in its statement.
Surprisingly, wild burro populations in 2024 increased 32 percent.
BLM attributed the increase in burro populations last year to “more extensive population surveys.”
Scott Streater can be reached on Signal at s_streater.80.
