Since the November election, the incoming administration has been throwing around a lot of ideas about ways to reduce government spending, including the creation of a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

So here’s an idea worth considering, one that could save taxpayers more than $100 million per year. That is the amount that is being spent to feed and care for the 65,000-70,000 wild (feral) horses and burros that have been removed from federal lands and placed in government corrals and private pastures.

Here’s some background: federal agencies are required by law to manage the free-ranging horses and burros on their lands. The Bureau of Land Management estimates that the appropriate management level for agency lands is about 27,000 head, the maximum population that can be sustained without damaging healthy rangelands.

The population is about three times the AML. The 2024 estimate of 73,520 was down from 2022, perhaps due to a very harsh winter (read: starvation), but the herds show remarkable ability to bounce back.

The 1971 federal law regarding these animals gives agencies three ways to bring herds down to AML: They can 1) humanely destroy the sick/lame/old animals; 2) humanely capture and remove excess animals; and 3) destroy excess animals in the most humane and cost-effective way possible.

Each year since 1982 Congress has taken option 3 off the table, so the agencies have been capturing and holding horses and burros in a senselessly ineffective attempt to achieve the AML. While they have been successful at adopting out a small portion of the captive animals, the majority are kept in corrals or long-term holding facilities until the end of their natural life, to the tune of $81 million per year.

In the meantime, native rangelands are suffering long-term damage due to uncontrolled feral animal grazing, destroying habitat for native wildlife from sage grouse and horned larks to pronghorn antelope and mule deer. Why? Because Congress persists in interfering through language it places in the annual agency appropriations bills. The BLM is prevented from managing the herds the way we would manage any other wild or feral population, through hunting or trapping and lethal removal.

In the more than four years that I have been writing this column on public lands issues, no single topic has generated more feedback than the idea of killing nonnative horses and burros in the name of wildlife habitat and healthy ecosystems. For some people horses evoke images of majestic stallions running wild and free across vast untamed landscapes, the very epitome of the wide-open spaces of the West.

That’s not my perspective. I can understand if that is yours, and like many other issues facing us we need tolerance for other perspectives. Your heart may be torn up by the idea of wild horses being killed, either by hunters or contract trappers, and I get that. Killing is a distasteful business.

By the same token, my heart is rent by the loss of native habitat on overgrazed and denuded grasslands and shrublands caused by out-of-control herds. We wouldn’t tolerate that of deer or elk herds or livestock on public lands, so why are we allowing our hands to be tied when it comes to nonnative horse and burro herds?

Unlike deer, elk and pronghorn, there are no effective predators on horses to help check herd growth. Starvation and disease appear to be the only way to effectively reduce the numbers, and I maintain these are hardly humane outcomes.

It’s long past the time to get a handle on these herds. If not for ecological, wildlife habitat or humane reasons, then let’s play the economic card and make the hard choices about these out-of-control exotic species in the name of government efficiency.

DOGE, are you listening?