Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (April 20th, 2016) –Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) caved to pressure from serial litigants in abandoning a common sense Endangered Species Act (ESA) proposal. This surrender rolled back one of the few positive moves by the Obama Administration to improve the ESA.

In May of 2015, the FWS proposed changes to the process under which the FWS considers petitions from the public to list species as threatened or endangered. Specifically, the Service proposed requiring petitioners to solicit information from state wildlife agencies prior to submitting listing petitions and to include information obtained from the states in their petitions. This small tweak would have ensured valuable state involvement in the process, improving the quality and accuracy of the information about species submitted to the FWS, which by law has limited time to analyze listing petitions before becoming vulnerable to lawsuits.

However, the FWS decided to abandon this simple, common-sense change in the face of opposition from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other serial litigants, who claim that consultation with state governments is unduly burdensome. This opposition is to be expected considering the tremendous success CBD and other litigants have had in gaming the listing petition process for their benefit. These repeat litigants flood the FWS with petitions and then file lawsuits on the petitions, forcing the agency into closed door settlements to gain more influence over ESA decision-making. In the process, they collect tax dollars to recover their attorney fees and costs, and then start the process all over again.

Hundreds of lawsuits and tens of millions of tax dollars later, it’s not a surprise that serial litigants will oppose any disruption of their lucrative business model. But for bowing to serial litigants and forgoing an opportunity to make a common sense improvement to the ESA, we give the FWS four bulls:

###