Trump’s Wild Horse Selloff

The Trump administration is rounding up federally protected wild horses and selling them for as little as $25 through a legal loophole that strips away their protections and can send them into the slaughter pipeline.

Project 2025 explicitly called for giving the government authority to “dispose” of wild horses this way. And as of May 2026, more than 58,000 wild horses remain in federal holding.

In 2025, the Bureau of Land Management more than doubled the number of wild horses it sold, to roughly 3,700. Some of those horses later turned up at auctions frequented by slaughter buyers.