Change in the air?
Iconic legislation finds itself caught in political crosswinds
WASHINGTON – Conservative Republicans are targeting the Endangered Species Act for a major makeover, arguing that the decadesold law is a failure.
Their primary piece of evidence: Of the 2,493 species listed as threatened or endangered, only 54 have recovered enough to be removed from the list – a delisting success rate of less than 3 percent.
“As a doctor, if I admit 100 patients to the hospital and only three recover enough under my treatment to be discharged ... I would deserve to lose my medical license with numbers like that,” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso said at a hearing on legislation he drafted. The Republican lawmaker is a doctor.
Democrats and environmental groups look at the law, passed in 1973 under a Republican president, and see a different picture.
“They define success as delisting,” said Derek Goldman of the Endangered Species Coalition, which includes more than 400 national, state and local environmental and conservation groups. Instead, he said, the key statistic is 99 – the percentage of
“As a doctor, if I admit 100 patients to the hospital and only three recover enough under my treatment to be discharged, Governor, I would deserve to lose my medical license.” Sen. John Barrasso Wyoming Republican, at a hearing on reform legislation
species listed under the law that have been saved from extinction.
Perhaps the most well-known example of the law’s success is the bald eagle. When it was listed as endangered in
1967 under a law that predated the Endangered Species Act, the count of bald eagles had fallen to fewer than 500. It rebounded enough to be delisted in
2007, and now there are more than
70,000 bald eagles in North America, according to Defenders of Wildlife.
For every soaring tale of bald eagle success, advocates for overhauling the law point to what they consider to be examples of environmental concerns trumping human needs, such as the 3to 4-inch-long delta smelt, which lives only in the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Farmers, lawmakers and even President Donald Trump have criticized diversion of water that could have gone to farmers in an attempt to save the smelt from extinction.
Debate goes back decades
Attempts by the federal government to protect endangered species date to 1900. But it wasn’t until 1967 that the first list of endangered species was published. It included 78 species of animals.
The Endangered Species Act was passed by Congress in 1973 at the urging of Republican President Richard Nixon, who said when he signed the bill into law that “nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.”
In addition to setting out and defining the categories of “endangered” and “threatened,” the law made plants and all invertebrates eligible for protection.
It applied broad “take” prohibitions on endangered species and blocked the federal government from doing anything that would jeopardize a listed species or destroy or modify its “critical habitat.”
Species become listed – or proposed for removal – either by proposals from federal scientists or by petitions from the public.
Congress has passed amendments several times through the years, but the basic framework of the 1973 law has remained untouched.
That the law has reached a political crossroads was clear in July when within one week:
❚ GOP members of the House introduced nine bills aiming to modernize the Endangered Species Act.
❚ The Trump administration proposed draft regulations to alter the act.
❚ Barrasso, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, held a hearing on his draft legislation.
‘It’s past time’
The House bills, most of which have catchy one-word acronyms for titles, range from one that would make it easier to delist a protected species to another that would require federal agencies to work more closely with states and a third that would require that data used to make listing decisions be made available to the public.
More than 100 groups have signed on to support the House package of bills, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the American Petroleum Institute, along with numerous sportsmen groups from several Western states.
“It’s past time for reform,” said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and the driving force behind conservative efforts to remake the relationship between the federal government and public lands.
The three regulations from the Trump administration – proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service – make technical changes that proponents say simply clarify language in current regulations. Opponents call them devastating.
More than 6,000 public comments have been filed on the proposed regulations. Sept. 24 marks the deadline for such opinions.
Ya-Wei Li of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center and formerly with the Defenders of Wildlife described initial coverage of the regulatory proposals as “disappointing and hyperbolic, nearly devoid of balanced, objective analysis.” Of the 36 proposals he counted, he believes 19 would have little effect on conservation, six would have positive effects, eight would have a negative result and three would have mixed results.
Seeking help from all sides
The Senate legislation written by Barrasso is based, in part, on the work of Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican. When he was chairman of the Western Governors’ Association, Mead launched an initiative in 2015 that sought to bring people together on all sides of the issue to fashion revisions to the law.
Barrasso’s bill would require greater state involvement in implementing the Endangered Species Act, allow for voluntary wildlife conservation agreements and establish a system to prioritize listing petitions.
Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, praised Mead’s efforts to craft a bipartisan proposal.
But, he said, “I am not fully convinced that a similar process is possible right now in Washington, D.C.,” and he said he could not support Barrasso’s legislation.
A major problem with the law, he said, is a lack of the funding needed to deal with all of the work that comes with the petitions seeking to list species as threatened or endangered and to plan for their recovery.
In fact, among the species listed under the law that are eligible for recovery plans, nearly one-fourth still do not have final plans, according to a study co-written by Li. One in 10 of the plans are more than 30 years old, the study found.
Fate this year is unclear
It’s not clear whether there will be time for Congress to take up the Endangered Species Act legislation before the end of the year. If Democrats win control of either the House or the Senate or both in November’s midterm elections, the legislation would be dead in the water.
Proponents of leaving the law alone count on its popularity with the public to protect it from any major overhaul. Polls consistently have found that more than four in five Americans support the Endangered Species Act.
Advocates for the law argue that rescuing species is a long-term endeavor and that the trend of delistings shows progress is being made.
Twenty-one species have recovered enough to be removed from the endangered list in the past five years – about the same number delisted in the previous 35 years.