Endangered priorities

Fish and Wildlife Service can't save what it can't manage 

The recent rediscovery of an ivory-billed woodpecker, previously thought to be extinct, has drawn attention to the Endangered Species Act and claims of its success.

On May 19, a Senate subcommittee overseeing the ESA convened to discuss the law's progress and possibilities for its reform. Despite the fact most senators and witnesses indicated the need to spend more money implementing the act, nobody mentioned the need to curb agency mismanagement of ESA appropriations. Contrary to the current political discussion, it is poor management rather than funding shortages that hamper the government's ability to help species recover.

Rediscovering an impressive species such as the ivory-billed woodpecker makes the ESA sound like a good investment. That is, until you peck away at the figures from a recent Government Accountability Office study. Of the more than 1,260 species on the list, 92 percent are ranked by the government as "high" to "moderately high" priority, those most in need of immediate help.

As these numbers demonstrate, one of the government's management problems results from the Fish and Wildlife Service's mishandling of the species priority rankings. Under the priority ranking system, species that face the highest threat and have the highest potential for recovery receive the highest priority. The problem is that instead of using the rankings to prioritize, the FWS has assigned "high" to "moderately high" rankings for nearly all of the species on the list. With such an indiscriminate ranking system, it is no wonder FWS claims it needs more money; it has no reliable mechanism for allocating funds to their best use.

In spite of the inadequate priority system, FWS still managed to spend $153 million in recovery funds from fiscal 2000 through 2003. About 95 percent of the funding focused on the 1,147 species of "high" to "moderately high" priority. Spending 95 percent of recovery funding on 92 percent of the most imperiled species sounds proportionate, but these aggregates are as flighty as the ivory-billed woodpecker.

When you compare the ranking and funding list together - something FWS does not do - you discover that none of the 20 species which received the most funding were of the highest priority. In fact, the species receiving the second most recovery funding - the bull trout - was ranked as a "9" on a priority scale of 1 to 18. The "threatened" bull trout received about four times more funding than the "endangered" black-footed ferret despite the ferret's score of a "2" on the scale.

As the GAO report indicates, a second problem with the current implementation of the ESA is that FWS bases its funding distributions "to a significant extent on factors other than a species' priority ranking." Factors such as regional office workload are often weighted heavily, while degree of threat and likelihood of success are not necessarily considered. According to GAO, officials from the Southwest region did not even know the priority rankings of the four species that did receive the most money in the region.

Similarly, if you call a veteran FWS employee to ask about the priority ranking of the ivory-billed woodpecker, as I did, you may find that said employee is not only unsure of the woodpecker's ranking, but also is unaware that the rankings even exist.

While there is political disagreement over the extent to which the ESA has been successful, it is clear that if FWS made an honest effort to address its management problems, more species would recover. Though it is certainly too early to speculate about the prospects of the ivory-billed woodpecker's "second chance," one would hope that FWS would revise its management practices to ensure that such species are given the best possible opportunity to recover.

Before senators and other officials consider appropriating more ESA funding, the FWS needs to demonstrate that it can fairly and responsibly use existing money in the interest of the species that it is charged with protecting.

The FWS can demonstrate this by devising a more coherent priority system and allocating funding accordingly. Until the service maximizes species recovery and proves that it can help species such as the ivory-billed woodpecker by spending money wisely, thoughts of appropriating more money should remain endangered.

John Shoaf is a research fellow with the Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University's free-market Mercatus Center.