More than 150 conservation groups are urging Congress to significantly increase the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget for endangered species conservation from $299 million to $870 million. Defenders of Wildlife says the increase would more accurately reflect the agency’s staffing and resource needs.
“Every lost biologist is a lost lifeline for an endangered animal or plant,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If Congress is serious about stopping the extinction crisis, it must rebuild and fully fund the Fish and Wildlife Service before more species disappear on its watch.”
The letter also calls on Congress to require a minimum number of full-time employees to lock in the needed workforce, protect it from politically driven cuts and give the Service the ability to carry out its statutory duties.
The letter notes that after just one year in office, the Trump administration has “gutted the federal workforce so severely that it will take decades for agencies to recover.” The Service alone “lost at least 18 percent of its staff nationwide, including more than 500 biologists working on the ground to protect and recover some of our most imperiled animals and plants and the wild places they live.”
In addition to staff cuts, the Service’s listing budget was reduced by 36 percent for the current fiscal year, severely limiting the program in charge of determining which animals and plants deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act.
“These rollbacks, along with massive reductions in agency resources, only compound the existing struggles that have plagued the Service for decades, including the systemic lack of funding to properly implement the Endangered Species Act,” wrote the groups
“No price can be put on extinction,” said Mary Beth Beetham, director of legislative affairs at Defenders of Wildlife. “The amount of funding needed by our expert wildlife agencies to properly implement the Endangered Species Act pales in comparison to the loss of even one single species which can never be replaced.”
The Service only receives about one-third of the funding it needs to carry out its mission of protecting endangered species and their habitats, notes the letter. As a result, hundreds of endangered species receive less than $1,000 a year for their recovery, with many receiving no funding from the Service at all.
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