ENDANGERED SPECIES: Obama admin tosses Bush's consultation rules
Allison Winter, E&E reporter
The Obama administration today threw out sweeping changes to endangered species regulations that the Bush administration had advanced in its final months.
The Interior and Commerce departments are reinstating requirements for government agencies to consult with federal biologists before undertaking projects that might affect threatened plants and animals. The move overturns Bush administration rules finalized last December and returns to regulations that have governed the management of federal endangered species since 1986.
"By rolling back this 11th hour regulation, we are ensuring that threatened and endangered species continue to receive the full protection of the law," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. "Because science must serve as the foundation for decisions we make, federal agencies proposing to take actions that might affect threatened and endangered species will once again have to consult with biologists at the two departments."
Salazar said the two departments would start reviewing the regulations and determine if changes are needed.
Environmental groups, wildlife biologists and Capitol Hill Democrats hailed the move. They said the Bush rules were rushed in the administration's final months and would undermine key endangered species protections.
"This is a huge victory for wildlife and wildlife habitats," said John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation. "Secretary Salazar has reinstated the principle of scientific integrity to the ESA. This has been key to the act's success for the past 35 years, and it will [be] especially needed as we work to help wildlife and ecosystems survive the unprecedented threat of global warming."
Congress gave the Obama administration power in a recent spending bill to retract two of Bush's endangered species rules without going through the usual review process.
The bill gives the administration until May 9 to overturn the consultation rule and a special rule for the polar bear that explicitly exempts greenhouse gases from Endangered Species Act regulation. Today's action does not address the polar bear rule. Interior is still reviewing that rule, a spokesman said today.
Critics of the Bush-era consultation rules said outside review is necessary to keep federal agencies from giving quick approval to their own roads or energy development projects. But some agency officials have asserted the exemptions could help them direct resources toward more useful actions to help species.
In a "town hall" meeting with Salazar today, the head of the Bureau of Land Management's endangered species program, Steve Hodapp, said his agency spends $3 million to $4 million every year on informal consultations that he thinks are largely unnecessary. Hodapp said that scientists in his own agency are "equally committed" to protecting wildlife in their own internal reviews.
"They do not have a hold on all scientific knowledge in the Fish and Wildlife Service," Hodapp said in an interview. "In fact, most of these projects when they are involved in consultation, our field biologists know more about the projects and about the species than somebody sitting in a state office 50 or 100 miles away."
