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Editorial - An Endangered Act - Editorial - NYTimes.com: "An Endangered Act

An Endangered Act

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Published: August 12, 2008

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.
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This week, the interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, proposed a regulatory overhaul of the act that would eliminate the requirement for independent scientific reviews of any project that could harm an endangered species living on federal land.

Instead, federal agencies would decide on their own whether the projects — including construction of highways and dams — pose a threat and then move ahead if they determine there is no problem. Mr. Kempthorne called the changes “narrow.” If these changes are narrow, we hate to think of what he means by broad.

The new regulations would overturn one of the act’s most fundamental provisions. Under current rules, federal agencies are required to submit their plans to either the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service.

This in effect gives scientists at those agencies the right to say no to any project or, as is most often the case, to require modifications if the project threatens an endangered species. Mr. Kempthorne would now effectively remove these agencies, whose job is to oversee the act, from the process.

The dangers of such “self-consultation” should be obvious.

The Bureau of Reclamation likes to build dams; the Department of Transportation likes to build highways. Protecting endangered species is not their priority. Other agencies, like the Office of Surface Mining or the Bureau of Land Management, have shown themselves far too vulnerable to pressure from the very industries, like mining, they are meant to regulate.

The Endangered Species Act has, on the whole, been successful in arresting the decline of many species that might otherwise have gone extinct. In cases like the bald eagle, it has helped restore the health of a species to a point where it can be removed from the endangered list. But many property owners and commercial interests, including developers and loggers, hate the act because, in their view, it unreasonably inflates costs.

The Bush administration has tried hard to accommodate their interests. It has gone to great lengths to circumnavigate the clear language of the law by rigging the science (in many cases ignoring their own scientists), negotiating settlements favorable to industry and simply refusing to obey court orders. This time, however, the administration means to rewrite the law itself, albeit through regulatory means.

There is now a 30-day comment period, after which the department is likely to issue a final rule. In 2006, courts struck down a similar if narrower effort to give the Environmental Protection Agency authority to approve pesticides without consulting with the Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service. Mr. Kempthorne’s latest assault deserves a similar fate.