When the Watchdogs Are Furloughed, the Cows Roam Free
As federal agencies go dark, the livestock industry keeps running the range — and the public must step up as watchdogs.
The U.S. government has gone dark again.
As of this writing, the shutdown has stretched into its second week, with the Senate still deadlocked and no funding deal in sight. Interior and Forest Service offices remain largely shuttered, and the White House budget office has warned that each passing week could strip another $15 billion from the U.S. economy as agencies bleed staff and capacity.
As Congress fails to agree on a funding bill, more than half of the Department of the Interior’s 58,600 employees have been sent home without pay. Nearly 31,000 workers across the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies are now furloughed. The majority of the staff in the Secretary’s Office—over 81 percent—are gone. Doors are locked, inboxes are silent, and field oversight has ground to a halt. Within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the impacts run even deeper. Roughly 42,000 of the agency’s 88,000 employees have been furloughed—nearly half its workforce.
Inside the agencies, chaos and confusion reign. Interior employees told E&E News they didn’t know whether they’d be furloughed until hours before the shutdown began. “Even my boss’s boss didn’t know,” said one. Another joked grimly, “If you’re a government employee, you better have a side gig.”
The fallout across our public lands is immediate and invisible at once.
National parks are technically open, but they’re running on fumes. Sensitive facilities like visitor centers and museums are locked to prevent vandalism. Agencies are dipping into limited campground fee funds to cover the bare minimum of maintenance and cleaning, but that money will run out fast.
The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres of federal land, has furloughed roughly 4,000 employees—while the remaining 5,000 are “excepted,” required to keep working because their duties supposedly protect human life or federal property. In practice, that means the Trump administration’s energy agenda continues unabated. Staff overseeing oil and gas leasing, coal permits, and critical minerals mining are still on the clock under what the president has declared a “national energy emergency.”
So while most BLM field offices are shuttered, the fossil fuel machine hums on.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has furloughed two-thirds of its 7,000 employees. National wildlife refuges are technically “accessible” if they don’t require staff presence, but visitor centers are closed, and enforcement patrols will be rare. At the Forest Service, most firefighters will stay on the job, but other conservation staff are gone. Environmental reviews are on hold. Payments to conservation programs are frozen.
Across Interior and Agriculture alike, the basic act of stewardship—the field checks, the data collection, the on-the-ground enforcement—has stopped. And when government oversight stops, it’s the land that suffers.
Because here’s the truth: cows don’t get furloughed.
Across the West, public lands livestock grazing is the most widespread commercial extractive use of federal land—covering roughly 155 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and another 90 million acres of national forests. Together, that’s nearly 250 million acres—an area larger than Texas—leased to private ranchers, at a fraction of fair market value.
These grazing permits are among the most heavily subsidized and least regulated programs in the federal government. The damage they cause is immense and well-documented: streambanks trampled to mud, water fouled, native grasses stripped, cheatgrass spreading, riparian habitats collapsed. Cattle displace elk, deer, pronghorn, and grizzly bears. They push wolves into conflict zones. They erode the very ecosystems the agencies claim to protect—and they do it on land that belongs to all of us.
And yet, through every shutdown and every budget crisis, the cows keep eating.
Permitted grazing continues even as the public servants tasked with monitoring it are sent home. Field inspections lapse. Reports of trespass cattle go unanswered. Illegal grazing in closed allotments goes unpunished. The system depends on the assumption that someone, somewhere, is watching—but right now, no one is.
That’s why Western Watersheds Project built Cow Pie Pal.
It’s a public watchdog tool—a way for anyone who hikes, hunts, fishes, or simply roams the backcountry to help document what’s happening to our shared lands. Using a free smartphone app called ArcGIS Survey123, users can log up to five photos, a few notes, and their GPS location whenever they encounter livestock damage or trespass on public lands. It takes just a few minutes and works offline, saving entries until you reconnect.
We created Cow Pie Pal because the federal government rarely collects this data—and when it does, it often buries it. Our goal is to build an open, verifiable record of abuse: the trampled creeks, broken fences, degraded meadows, and “hammered” exclosures that show what really happens under this century-old grazing regime. Every report submitted through the app helps us map impacts, identify repeat offenders, and pressure agencies to enforce the law.
In the absence of a functioning government, this is what accountability looks like.
Public lands belong to all of us. When the agencies stop working, the responsibility falls to the public—to hikers, anglers, birders, and citizens who care enough to bear witness. A photo taken on a phone can become evidence in court, a data point in a map, a line in a report that forces a response.
Shutdowns are more than budget fights. They’re stress tests of what we value—and who keeps power when public institutions fail. Right now, the energy industry still gets its leases. Ranchers still get their subsidies. The machinery of exploitation never really stops. But neither should we.
If you’re out on the land in the coming weeks, bring Cow Pie Pal with you. Document what you see. Cows in a riparian zone? The land grazed to dirt? A fenced exclosure with hoofprints inside? Snap a photo, make a note, and send it in.
Download ArcGIS Survey123 from your phone’s app store. Open it without signing in. Paste this link into the search bar: https://arcg.is/0irPyK. That’s all you need.
Every submission helps build the case for a more honest conversation about what’s happening on America’s public lands—especially now, when no one else is watching.
Grace Kuhn is the digital director for Western Watersheds Project, grace@westernwatersheds.org
Thank you for this important report on our western watersheds. We cannot see what is going on everywhere and depend on reality checks.