"Fortunately the Endangered Species Act (ESA) sets strict standards to protect the public and the environment from biased and unscientific abuses of its provisions," said Dan Keppen, Alliance Executive Director. "We are taking this action to protect the integrity of ESA and to ensure that those standards are applied to correct the federal government's unmitigated record of failure in the Delta."
 
For the past 15 years, federal regulators have ordered more and more stringent restrictions on the water supplies pumped through the Delta to serve California's farms and cities, on the presumption that the pumps were harming delta smelt. Those restrictions have cost California billions of dollars in economic losses and tens of thousands of jobs. But instead of showing any benefit from these measures, the population of delta smelt has continued to decline.
 
Among the many defects in USFWS's December order, which reduced by one third the state's water supplies to more than 25 million people, the Alliance pointed out that:
 
Instead of conducting the independent peer review that the law requires, USFWS brought in the authors of the papers on which the agency's order was based. In effect, they were being asked to review the adequacy of their own work. None would qualify under the standards set by ESA, the Information Quality Act or the federal Office of Management and Budget guidelines.
 
Although ESA requires USFWS to use the best available scientific and commercial data, the agency instead based its findings in part on an analysis which had not been published or peer reviewed and, supposedly, data, which USFWS refused even to disclose. Moreover, it turns out the agency did not actually possess some of the data that it claimed it used to order the cutbacks in water supplies.
 
Rather than relying on scientific evidence to form its conclusions as the law requires, USFWS only cited the bits and pieces of information that supported its own assumptions and ignored the rest.