Picture this: a rancher in central Montana wants to put in a stock water pipeline on his BLM allotment. It’s a practical improvement — helps distribute cattle across the range, takes pressure off the creek, improves the land. His grandfather probably built something similar with a shovel and a mule. Today? He calls the local BLM field office and gets told they’re years out from completing the environmental analysis required to approve it.

Years. For a water pipeline.

This isn’t an isolated story. It’s happening across the West, and the Montana Natural Resource Coalition of Counties put it in writing to federal officials in May of this year. In a formal comment letter to BLM regarding National Environmental Policy Act procedures, MtNRC laid out the problem clearly: domestic livestock producers are being blocked from installing rangeland improvements not because anyone decided those improvements were bad, but because the federal environmental review bureaucracy simply can’t keep up.

Fences, wells, water pipelines, reservoirs, stock tanks, vegetation treatments — these are what the law calls rangeland improvements. They’ve been prioritized by Congress for decades. Under the Public Rangeland Improvement Act of 1978, the Secretary of Interior is directed to manage public rangelands with an intensive maintenance, management, and improvement program. The Taylor Grazing Act itself explicitly authorizes fences, wells, and reservoirs on grazing districts. FLPMA backs it up further.

Congress didn’t stutter. These improvements are supposed to happen. They benefit livestock, wildlife, and the long-term health of the range. But the federal NEPA process — the environmental review framework — has become a wall between ranchers and the improvements their permits are supposed to allow.

The fix is straightforward, and BLM already uses it for other activities: a Categorical Exclusion, or CE. A CE is a determination that a category of actions normally doesn’t have significant environmental impact, so it doesn’t require a full Environmental Assessment or Environmental Impact Statement. BLM already issues CEs for certain forestry projects. The MtNRC is asking: why not for rangeland improvements?

In fact, on March 31, 2026, the USDA and DOI signed a joint Memorandum of Understanding specifically directed at advancing grazing on Forest Service and BLM lands. That MOU explicitly calls for using categorical exclusions as a tool to create “quicker pathways to opportunities for permittees” — including rangeland improvements. Six days later, BLM issued a proposed revision of its NEPA implementing procedures. But the revision only addressed forestry CEs. Rangeland improvements weren’t touched.

The MtNRC called that out directly. If the federal government just signed an MOU pledging to use CEs to advance grazing, and then issued a regulatory revision that ignored rangeland improvements entirely, something is wrong. Either the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, or the commitment to ranchers isn’t as serious as the press release made it sound.

The coalition’s ask is specific: revise 516 DM 1 Appendix 2, section 11.9(D) to add a CE covering rangeland improvements — fences, wells, pipelines, reservoirs, stock tanks, vegetation treatments — when they’re consistent with an approved grazing permit or lease. The criteria are already defined in statute and BLM policy. This isn’t creating new law. It’s applying existing law the way Congress intended.

Here in Fergus County, we understand what it means when infrastructure doesn’t get built. A fence that doesn’t get fixed means cattle in the wrong pasture. A water source that doesn’t get developed means overgrazing around the one creek that’s left. These are real consequences for real families running real cattle on real land. The environmental review process was never supposed to be a roadblock to practical range management. It was supposed to be a safeguard against genuinely harmful projects — not a bureaucratic bottleneck that treats a stock tank like an industrial facility.

Congress has been clear about its priorities for public rangelands since 1934. The improvements that keep this industry alive should not require years of federal paperwork. BLM needs to catch up to its own stated commitments and give ranchers the tools the law has always intended them to have.