From the Office of Doc Hastings
Last Thursday, December 19th, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would list two plants, the Umtanum desert buckwheat and the White Bluffs bladderpod, as endangered and designated over 2,700 acres of federally owned land in Franklin and Benton Counties as critical habitat. “While it’s encouraging that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has backtracked and now will not designate 419 acres of private property in Franklin County as critical habitat for these sub-species of plants, I have serious concerns about how the Service’s underlying decision to list the plants as endangered was reached,” said Hastings, who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee with jurisdiction over the Endangered Species Act (ESA). “The Service agreed, behind closed doors, to a deadline with litigious groups to list the bladderpod this year as part of its ‘mega-settlement’ of numerous lawsuits and it’s clear that nothing—not even new, contradictory independent science—was going to stop them.” Hastings highlighted the Service's latest decision as a concrete example of how the 40-year-old ESA is in need of reform.
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