The Bureau of Land Management’s mismanagement of the wild horse and burro program is a textbook case for those who study government waste. The BLM spends more than $50 million a year rounding up what are (in theory) wild and free-roaming horses and burros, and then warehousing them in government-run corrals and pens.

The federal agency contends that there are too many horses on the range across the millions of acres of sparsely populated land out West. What constitutes an appropriate population level for our nation’s herds, however, remains the subject of fierce debate.