Endangered Species Act: politics endangers science
A Congressional hearing investigates whether political goals have pushed science out of the Endangered Species Act.
On May 18, Americans celebrated the second annual Endangered Species Day to commemorate the recovery of species, such as the American bald eagle and the humpback whale. Yet the very law that helped these animals return from the brink of extinction has been threatened by what many see as the Bush Administration’s continued efforts to manipulate the scientific underpinnings of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
Several problems came to light in April following an internal Department of the Interior (DOI) investigation. The former deputy assistant secretary at DOI, Julie MacDonald, was found guilty of altering scientific content in the agency’s documents. MacDonald was also found guilty of forcing scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to tweak their findings and of leaking confidential information to lobbyists for the California Farm Bureau federation and other industry groups. She resigned weeks after the public release of the investigation results.
In early May, the Democrats launched their own inquiry of the matter and called a congressional hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources. Most of the witnesses at the hearing testified about MacDonald’s and other top DOI officials’ manipulation of scientific data. The hearing also focused on the Bush Administration’s renewed efforts to revise the ESA by rewriting regulations that guide the enforcement of the law.
“From changes in regulations to poorly developed legal reviews that have left the agency sorely vulnerable to attack in the courts, the evidence of a systematic effort to undermine the law and species protection is quite clear,” said Committee Chair Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), in his opening remarks. The agency was bent on “weakening the law by administrative fiat,” and doing so “in the shadows, shrouded from public view,” he added.
But DOI’s assistant secretary Lynn Scarlett testified that she and Secretary Dirk Kempthorne were personally committed to “transparency, quality, and integrity of science,” in implementing the ESA.
Despite the focus on MacDonald, her conduct was merely “symptomatic” of a larger problem, according to most of the witnesses. Jamie Rappaport Clark, the executive vice president of the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife, served as the director of FWS from 1997 to 2001. She told the committee that the drop in funding to implement the ESA, and the repeated influence of political considerations with recovery plans has led to only 57 species being protected in the last 6 years. The number of species listed under former President Clinton, however, was 522.
The willingness to rewrite scientific and technical findings to serve political aims has “accelerated” in recent years, testified Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an advocacy group. A 2005 joint survey by PEER and the Union of Concerned Scientists found that FWS biologists had been directed to refrain from making “jeopardy or other findings that are protective of species.”
“Everyone faces these kinds of things at some point in their career,” says retired FWS biologist Sally Steffurud. Yet “the incidence of being asked to do these kinds of things, and the way you’re asked to, has changed dramatically over time,” she says. Just a month and a half before Steffurud retired in 2002, she was asked by her supervisor to change her findings from jeopardy to non-jeopardy on a question related to the Gila topminnow, a tiny bottom feeding fish found in the Gila Basin in Arizona. Changing her results would free the agency from any responsibility of mitigating the threat to the species from the Colorado River Water Project.
At the hearing the Democrats also asked Scarlett about draft rules that would alter the ESA. On March 16, David Bernhardt, the department’s solicitor, without any formal announcement, posted a new interpretation of part of the ESA that refers to the “significant portion of its [a species’] range,” on his DOI webpage. Soon after, FWS staff leaked a draft of new regulations to weaken ESA protections.
Bernhardt’s interpretation limits the protection of a species to its current range only, which would “prevent the recovery of most species,” according to Kieran Suckling of the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity. For example, when the American bald eagle was listed in 1967, it was found in only 10 states. “If it had been listed under the solicitor’s memo, they only would have listed [it] in those states,” Suckling says, and “they never would have been able to have a recovery program to reintroduce it to the rest of the states.” No longer threatened, the species now thrives in 48 states.
Scarlett said that the draft regulations leaked in March have been abandoned, and new ones are being drafted. Any changes to the regulations that implement the ESA would be published in the Federal Register for public comment, she added. Yet, in his opening remarks, Rahall said that the FWS had gone to “extreme lengths to keep these documents away from the committee.”
