Species recovery program faces budget cuts
By TED MONOSON
Star-Tribune Washington bureau Friday, March 05, 2004
WASHINGTON — Fish and Wildlife Service director Steve Williams on Thursday defended a proposal to cut endangered species recovery programs by 15 percent in 2005.
The Bush administration has proposed cutting the budget for species recovery projects by $10 million next year, from the $67.9 million the agency is receiving this year. That news came Thursday, the day after Williams helped roll out a plan to give Idaho and Montana officials more authority to manage wolves.
He told a congressional panel that under the budget proposal, the overall amount of money set aside for endangered species programs is set to increase by $23.8 million from $255.6 million in fiscal year 2004 to $279.4 million in fiscal year 2005.
Much of the increase is for listing endangered species and grant programs that require states to match the federal dollars that they would receive. Under the proposal, the agency’s overall budget for fiscal year 2005 would be $1.3 billion, which would be $22.6 million more than it is receiving this year.
Washington Rep. Norm Dicks, who is the top Democrat on the House panel that has jurisdiction over the agency’s budget, was somewhat baffled by the endangered species proposal.
“Isn’t the whole idea of the (endangered species) act to recover endangered and threatened species?” said Dicks, who played linebacker at the University of Washington in the 1960s and still looks like he could stop a running back.
“We are dealing with a lot of hard choices,” Williams said. “Our intention is to work with our partners and leverage state and private dollars to get to the federal dollars.”
In a conversation after the hearing, Williams said the amount of authority that Idaho and Montana assume over wolf management would depend on how much the states can afford to spend.
Under the Bush administration’s proposal, the main source of federal money for wolf management would be grants that would have to be matched with state dollars.
“The state will take on whatever level of management they want to and can afford,” Williams said. “They can say here’s these opportunities for us to participate and we want to pick A, B and D, and we’re not interested in C. Maybe C costs too much to administer.”
Williams added that when the agency was working on its budget proposal, it did not know if it would be proposing a rule to allow Idaho and Montana to assume more management.
“When we were putting all that stuff together, we didn’t know if that was going to be a reality,” Williams said.
Williams, who is a Vermont native, also noted that the agency’s budget proposal is just the beginning of the process.
“This is just Step 1 of the budget process and I expect that members of Congress will want to provide some input,” Williams said.
While constructing the budget, the agency did not pay too much attention to what Congress set aside for wolf recovery this year. The agency did not include $1.5 million for wolf recovery in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming that lawmakers included in this year’s budget. Williams said this was part of a general Bush administration policy of eliminating specific congressional budget requests, which are known as earmarks.