Congress prompts Fish & Wildlife Service to revise endangered species delisting decisions

Congress's investigative arm this week accused the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) of playing politics with the nation's animals. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report charging that U.S. Department of Interior service apparently decided which animals to designate-and protect-as endangered species based on political rather than scientific criteria. Fish & Wildlife has been subject to a number of recent congressional probes.

The GAO last year found that the FWS's former deputy assistant secretary Julie MacDonald had violated federal information disclosure rules by sharing internal agency documents with industry lobbyists such as the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Pacific Legal Foundation, and that she stood to gain financially from her agency's decision to delist the Sacramento splittail fish because she and her husband's farming business located near the fish's habitat would have been subject to restrictions. MacDonald resigned after a highly critical report by U.S.

Department of the Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney in May 2007. In its newest report, the GAO says that the FWS is revising seven of eight decisions made during MacDonald's five-year tenure to strip species from the protective list. Among them: the arroyo toad, white-tailed prairie dog and Canada lynx. The decision to cut the southwestern willow flycatcher's habitat in half was upheld because scientific evidence supported the move.

The GAO says it is continuing a review of the merits of some 20 decisions made during her administration to strip species of their protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.