If there was any doubt that the Clinton administration has come full-circle in its capitulation to ranchers in the West, the question was pretty much resolved this week.
President Clinton told a Billings, Mont., newspaper that the administration made a mistake in 1993 when it first proposed raising grazing fees for the cattle, sheep and horses that feed on public lands. Doing so, he said, gave Republicans a weapon to unfairly accuse him of waging war on the West.
That may make for good politics for the president in Montana, but it is lousy policy for American taxpayers, who actually own the land–about 270 million acres of it–and have been subsidizing the ranchers’ use of it for decades.
The administration has been beating tactical retreats on the issue since early in its tenure, when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt pledged a dramatic, long-overdue reform of grazing policy–including getting ranchers to pay something resembling market-rate grazing fees for their privilege and establishing programs to protect and restore land and watersheds damaged by overgrazing.
But the ranchers, for their relatively small numbers, are a powerful bunch–many of whom regard the land as theirs by birthright and the federal government as an intruder that ought to stay out of their way. With their allies in Congress–an alliance of Republicans and Western Democrats–they forced the administration into a series of compromises until there was little left to compromise about.
Babbitt himself gave up on raising grazing fees late last year, saying he would leave it up to the new, Republican-dominated Congress. Fat chance of that happening. He did promise to impose regulations to improve range management, but that strategy is flawed because crafting the programs depends on heavy local and state involvement–with a built-in bias toward ranching interests.
As an example of how that may play out, consider the recent account by Tribune reporter Karen Brandon of the range wars in Idaho. Despairing of getting any substantial federal reform, environmentalists have tried a new ploy: bidding with ranchers at auctions for grazing leases on state land, hoping to retire the most environmentally sensitive.
It was a fair process with the state and its taxpayers the ultimate potential winners–until the environmentalists outbid the ranchers. Then the state Land Board arbitrarily restored the leases to the ranchers, in one case to a rancher who didn’t even bother to bid.
Such are the obstacles facing anyone trying to bring reform to grazing policy, and why a strong federal role is so important. But now we have the president in effect apologizing for stirring the fuss in the first place. If, as Babbitt once said, reform is the art of the possible, this administration isn’t ready for it.
