The Endangered Species Act continues to face attacks in Congress. There are bills to prohibit the listing of species not native to the United States, to allow the government to delist species regardless of recovery status, to delist the gray wolf and grizzly bear specifically, and to prohibit listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA)—which authorizes Congress to overturn rules recently promulgated by federal agencies—has been used to attempt to reinstate the Trump administration’s severely limited definition of “habitat” under the ESA and to undo the listing of two lesser prairie-chicken population segments and the uplisting (from threatened to endangered) of the northern long-eared bat. The latter two efforts passed Congress and were thwarted only by a presidential veto. These “CRA resolutions” are particularly insidious, as the CRA prevents a federal agency from creating another regulation in the future that is “substantially the same” as the voided one—thus it might prove impossible to ever relist these species, even when they are on the verge of extinction.
Conversely, wildlife champions in Congress have introduced bills to enhance species protections. One example is the Extinction Prevention Act (HR 3494/S 1708), sponsored by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to provide much-needed funding for some of the most imperiled domestic species, including butterflies, freshwater mussels, and Southwest desert fish. Another is the Saving America’s Pollinators Act (HR 4277), sponsored by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Jim McGovern (D-MA), which would suspend the use of neonicotinoids or any other pesticide potentially harmful to bees and other pollinators absent a science-based determination that they are safe to use.