Flawed wildlife bill passes a House committee

A flawed wildlife bill, albeit one introduced with certain good intentions, passed the House Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday April 16. The measure by Chairman Bruce Westerman (Arkansas) would authorize a wildlife conservation program at $320 million per year. Most of the funds would go to state wildlife agencies. 

It was a party-line vote, with those Republicans who voted supporting it, and the Democrats who voted opposing it. 

If it’s money for wildlife, what’s not to like? The bill includes the following problems: 

• It doesn’t assure the states of any funding for their wildlife plans. Instead, it authorizes funding up to $300 million annually for the states and up to $20 million annually for tribes, but it leaves it to the annual appropriations process in Congress to determine whether any money materializes, and if so, at what level (capped at $300M and $20M). 
• Should funding be made available, it would pay for the program by taking money from other conservation programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal. 
• The program ends after September 2029.
• The bill alters the Endangered Species Act, America’s wildly successful wildlife law, in ways that would add bureaucracy to recovering species and could delay protections for newly discovered species for years if not decades.  
• Unlike other congressional wildlife bills, the bill does not have bipartisan support, meaning that its odds of becoming law (and then enduring) are slim. 

I have a couple of thoughts on all this. 

Even though we don’t support his bill due to the problems mentioned above, we’re glad to see Chairman Westerman engaged on the topic of how to protect wildlife in the U.S. and how to keep wildlife populations from dropping so low they need Endangered Species Act protections. 

Without major changes, I don’t see Chairman Westerman’s bill passing. But there is a bill that could fare much better and did pass the House in the last congress. It’s the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.

As of now, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act is a Senate bill and it’s bipartisan. (We hope to see it introduced in the House soon.) It would provide dedicated funding, i.e. not left to the ebbs and flows of the annual appropriations process, to the states each year at $1.3 billion, plus $100 million for tribal wildlife conservation. And it doesn’t alter the Endangered Species Act.

We’d like to see Congress spend its time and energy on passing the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act.