Bush Sued Over 11th-Hour Endangered Species Act Rule Changes

“When I announced the listing of the polar bear as threatened in May, I agreed with the President that the Endangered Species Act is not the right tool to set climate change policy,” Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said. “I also announced that day that we would propose common sense modifications to the existing regulations in order to provide greater certainty that the listing would not become a backdoor for setting climate change policy.”

“The regulations that were finalized today undermine fundamental protections for the nation’s endangered species,” said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We hope an Obama administration or Congress will act quickly to undo this 11th hour attempt to weaken our most important law for protecting wildlife.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Defenders of Wildlife immediately filed suit in the Northern District of California to stop the regulations, arguing that they violated the Endangered Species Act and did not go through the required public review process. The Bush administration first proposed the regulations on August 11th and rushed them through an abbreviated process in which more than 300,000 comments from the public were reviewed in two to three weeks. The new regulations’ environmental impacts were analyzed in a short and cursory environmental assessment, rather than a fuller environmental impact statement.

“This is a clear example of a lame-duck administration ramming through weakened regulations that are opposed by Congress and the public,” Greenwald said. “When the survival of species hangs in the balance, public policy should not be rushed.”

The changes, which will go into effect in about 30 days, were completed in just four months. But they could take Obama much longer to reverse.

They will eliminate some of the mandatory, independent reviews that government scientists have performed for 35 years on dams, power plants, timber sales and other projects, a step that developers and other federal agencies have blamed for delays and cost increases.

The rules also prohibit federal agencies from evaluating the effect on endangered species and the places they live from a project's contribution to increased global warming.

Interior Department officials described the changes as "narrow," but admitted that the regulations were controversial inside the agency. Environmentalists viewed them as eroding the protections for endangered species.

Interior officials said federal agencies could still seek the expertise of federal wildlife biologists on a voluntary basis, and that other parts of the law will ensure that species are protected.

"Nothing in this regulation relieves a federal agency of its responsibilities to ensure that species are not harmed," said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in a conference call with reporters.

Current rules require biologists in the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to sign off on projects even when it is determined that they are not likely to harm species. The rule finalized Thursday would do away with that requirement, reducing the number of consultations so that the government's experts can focus on cases that pose the greatest harm to wildlife, officials said.