Current work in wildlife, rivers, public lands, and climate

WASHINGTON, D.C – A budget bill currently under consideration contains an anti-wildlife rider that blocks Endangered Species Act protection efforts for several species of imperiled sage grouse. The bill has cleared a key appropriations committee and now heads to both houses of Congress for final approval. If approved, it would block U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funding for endangered species regulations to protect greater and Gunnison sage grouse.

“The Endangered Species Act is designed to keep politics out of the way of protecting our most imperiled wildlife, and it’s been very successful,” observed Erik Molvar, Wildlife Biologist with WildEarth Guardians. “Politicians aren’t wildlife experts, and they should leave the management of our most imperiled wildlife to scientists who know what they’re doing. Political ploys like these, interfering with commonsense wildlife protections, are why sage grouse are headed for extinction today.”

Elsewhere in the appropriations bill, Congress boosted funding for fossil fuels well beyond what was originally budgeted by the Department of Energy even as it blocked funding for sage grouse protections.

“In one fell swoop, Congress is boosting funding for fossil fuels while blocking funding for protecting the wildlife impacted by energy development,” noted Molvar. “It’s a dream outcome for the fossil fuels industry, and marks the payoff for the huge sums of money they’ve invested in campaign contributions at the expense of rare wildlife and healthy public lands.”

Guardians criticized the lack of transparency in the budgeting process, blaming the major blow to wildlife protections on back-room dealmaking. “When Congress locks itself in a back room to cut budget deals, industries with inside influence win, and wildlife and the American public lose,” said Molvar.

The sage grouse budget rider fits into the context of broader Tea Party efforts to dismantle federal environmental laws, reflected in the Cliven Bundy uprising in Nevada over the seizure of livestock that were trespassing on public lands closed to grazing, and the off-road vehicle incursion into Utah’s Recapture Canyon, which had been closed by federal government to protect fragile Native American artifacts and religious sites.

“This attack on the Endangered Species Act is part of a broader partisan effort to strip away the federal regulations that protect the environment, so extractive industries can have free rein to pillage the West without regard to the environmental destruction that results,” Molvar concluded. “Far from being satisfied with its own gridlock, Congress is now exporting gridlock to the Executive Branch by blocking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from doing its job.”