Photo by Meg Frederick
The president’s 2027 budget proposal does not include prohibitions against the government killing healthy wild horses and burros or selling them to slaughter.
The proposal, released today, would slash the Bureau of Land Management budget by 33% — a cut that, when paired with a lack of protective language, could place the lives of thousands of captive wild horses at risk.
The president’s 2026 budget proposal also left out what had become standard protective language. Fortunately, both the House and Senate included it in appropriations bills.
Return to Freedom is deeply concerned by the omission of this important protective language.
It reveals a lack of consideration for the financial commitment that Congress and the American people have invested in advancing viable, non-lethal solutions for managing federally protected wild horses and burros.
RTF will work with Congress and other stakeholders to ensure that this critically important language protecting wild horses and burros is again included in the final bill.
Congress appropriated $142 million to the BLM’s wild horse program for 2026. The president’s 2027 budget proposes just $106.8 million.
At best, that would cover the cost of caring for the 58,274 captive wild horses and burros living in off-range holding facilities.
The BLM spent $101 million on holding in 2024. It has not posted its expenditures for last year.
The threat of allowing the agency to kill healthy wild horses is not new. In 2017, some members of Congress pushed for the BLM to be able to euthanize (shoot, in all likelihood) captive wild horses and burros.
Our work with divergent public lands stakeholders has since yielded broad support for a non-lethal wild horse management approach with the use of proven, safe, and humane fertility control at its center.
That resulted in Congress calling for (though not demanding) increased fertility control use and providing additional funding for the BLM’s program starting in Fiscal Year 2020, under the first Trump administration.
The president’s 2027 budget proposal does again include language barring the U.S. Department of Agriculture from hiring horse meat inspectors — annual defund language that RTF lobbies for annually that has kept horse slaughter plants from reopening in the United States since 2007.