Trump Orders Interior Department to Move Toward Delisting Gray Wolves, Citing Ranchers' Losses

President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders in the Oval Office on Friday directing the Interior Department to begin unwinding endangered-species protections for gray wolves and Mexican wolves, reopening a decade-old fight between ranchers and conservationists just as beef prices sit near record highs heading into the midterm campaign.

The centerpiece order, titled Supporting America's Ranchers, gives Interior Secretary Doug Burgum 90 days to determine whether gray wolves and Mexican wolves have met recovery criteria under the Endangered Species Act and, if so, to begin delisting or downlisting them. It also instructs Burgum to draft legislation for Congress and to press states to loosen their own rules on when ranchers may kill wolves that are attacking livestock. A companion order directs the Agriculture Department to review country-of-origin labeling rules for beef within the same 90-day window.

Trump signed the orders flanked by ranchers who described losing cattle to wolf packs, according to an account of the signing published by The Spokesman-Review. "You're not allowed to protect yourself, right? Or your company, your cattle," Trump told the group, before adding, "So how do you like the idea that I'm letting you do that?"

The numbers

The policy lands on an industry already reshaped by scarcity. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent cattle inventory count put the national herd at 86.2 million head as of mid-2026, the smallest since 1951 and down roughly 9 percent from its last cyclical peak in 2019. Beef cow numbers have fallen to 27.6 million, and this year's calf crop is down 2 percent from last year, according to the agency's National Agricultural Statistics Service.

That shrinking supply has pushed prices higher. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' average retail price series for ground beef shows the price hit $6.89 a pound in July, up from $6.25 a year earlier and from roughly $5.55 in January 2025, an increase of more than 20 percent in a year and a half. On the wolf side of the ledger, the federal-state Mexican Wolf Interagency Field Team's year-end count found a minimum of 319 wolves in the wild at the close of 2025, up from 286 the year before, continuing an unbroken decade of growth that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's population tally traces back to a low point after the subspecies' 1998 reintroduction. Gray wolves across the wider Lower 48 number in the thousands, concentrated in the northern Rockies and western Great Lakes.

How ranchers and wolves ended up back in court

Gray wolves were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the early 1970s after decades of trapping, poisoning and shooting had erased them from nearly all of the Lower 48. Federal reintroductions to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 rebuilt populations in the northern Rockies, while a separate program brought Mexican wolves back to the Arizona-New Mexico borderlands starting in 1998. As the animals recovered and spread onto grazing land, ranchers began pressing to have them removed from federal protection region by region, a process that has played out in courts and Congress for two decades.

The first Trump administration stripped Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves nationwide in 2020; a federal judge vacated that rule in 2022, restoring protections across most of the Lower 48 outside the northern Rockies, where wolves had already been delisted by earlier acts of Congress. In December, the Republican-controlled House passed a bill from Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin to delist wolves nationwide by statute; the measure has since stalled in the Senate, where it has not been scheduled for a floor vote. Boebert has argued that the species' recovery is settled science and that continued federal protection has become a matter of politics rather than biology. Friday's order pursues the same goal through the executive branch, directing Burgum to move on delisting administratively while still asking Congress to act on the underlying law.

Reaction from ranchers, conservationists and consumer groups

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who joined Trump for the signing, said current law leaves ranchers unable to defend their herds. Cattle groups welcomed the move. American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall told Trump he had "been the best president for farmers and ranchers," while R-CALF USA President Dave Hyde called the orders "a step forward" while cautioning that they "don't fix everything with the stroke of a pen."

Wildlife advocates reacted with alarm. Kitty Block, president of Humane World for Animals, said "the war on wolves needs to end, not escalate," arguing that decisions about the species "should be based on science, not political favors." Claire Musser of the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project noted the Mexican wolf population remains genetically fragile despite its recent growth, and Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity told Common Dreams his organization is "prepared to prove in court that downlisting Mexican wolves and a steep increase in killings would not only be cruel but also deeply unwise and illegal."

• Ranchers and cattle-industry groups, who argue predation losses and regulatory burden are squeezing small operators
• Conservation and animal-welfare organizations, which are preparing legal challenges to any delisting decision
• Consumers, whose grocery bills are unlikely to fall quickly regardless of the order's outcome
• Interior and Agriculture department staff, who now face 90-day deadlines to produce recommendations

Consumer advocates were skeptical the orders would touch the root causes of high beef prices. Rebecca Wolf, food policy director at Food & Water Watch, argued that the administration's own trade moves undercut the message, pointing to an earlier decision to pause tariffs on roughly 300,000 metric tons of beef imports from Argentina and Brazil for 90 days in an effort to bring down grocery prices. She contrasted that with the profits reported by the country's largest meatpackers, saying consolidation in processing, not wolves, is squeezing both ranchers and shoppers. Farm Action President Angela Huffman offered a more measured assessment, saying the orders show "the administration is listening to problems farmers and ranchers have raised for years" but "stop short of the stronger reforms independent producers need."

What happens next

The clock now runs on two parallel 90-day reviews. Burgum's Interior Department must report by early December on whether gray wolves and Mexican wolves meet the Endangered Species Act's recovery benchmarks, a finding that would trigger formal rulemaking to delist or downlist the species — a process that itself typically takes months and invites public comment. Any resulting decision is all but certain to be challenged in federal court by the same conservation groups that successfully overturned the 2020 delisting, teeing up a legal fight that could stretch well past November's midterm elections. Agriculture's parallel review of country-of-origin labeling rules could move faster, since the department can act under existing statutory authority rather than waiting on a species-recovery finding. Separately, the Boebert-Tiffany bill to delist wolves by statute remains before the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain in a chamber that must also confront a government funding deadline and a crowded pre-election calendar. For now, ranchers have a presidential directive but not yet a change in law, and the herd size and beef prices that framed Friday's signing are unlikely to move before voters go to the polls.