Endangered Act

Honest, it's just a " narrow regulatory change, " US Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne told reporters when his department was revealed to be altering the Endangered Species Act in the last months of the Bush Administration. Journalists didn't buy it. As the New York Times put it in an editorial, " The Bush administration has never masked its distaste for most environmental laws or its ambitions to thwart Congress's will. Now in its waning months, it is trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act. " The " narrow regulatory change " was revealed by the Associated Press on 11 August. The AP learned that the Interior Department was publishing a draft rule that would no longer require federal projects that could harm threatened or endangered species to be vetted by biologists in the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. That requirement has been in place for 35 years. Some in Congress and others in the White House have been trying to amend the Act for many years now, but lacking consensus about how the Act should be changed, the Bush Administration decided it would just do whatever it wanted by changing the rules rather than trying to change the law that put those rules in place. " Parts of the Endangered Species Act may soon be extinct, " wrote the AP as it broke the story. That report led Interior Secretary Kempthorne to call a hasty telephone news conference to defend his motivations. The " narrow regulatory change " would simply spread responsibility for the Act to many federal agencies, he told reporters, and relieve the burden currently placed upon biologists at US Fish and Wildlife Service and its maritime counterpart, the National Marine Fisheries Service (a bureau of the Commerce Department). Kempthorne said the changes are also intended to prevent the federal government from using the Endangered Species Act to address global warming — a potential precedent set when the Bush Administration felt compelled to list the polar bear as threatened News focus because its icy habitat has been melting away. The late-afternoon telephone news conference didn't get all that much news play itself — but it was widely discussed on editorial pages in the days that followed.