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Thirty Years of Failure in Endangered Species Recovery

What federal agencies got wrong, why private landowners matter, and how species recovery could finally work.

Thirty Years of Failure in Endangered Species Recovery
What federal agencies got wrong, why private landowners matter, and how species recovery could finally work.

The Epic Failure of Endangered Species Recovery by Federal Agencies: USFWS, and USDA’s, NRCS: an anatomy of across the board failure.

Putting a spot light on fading issues of the day. It is hard to have peace of mind to write about the nuances of environmental problems when our nation is engaged in a war half the circumference of the earth away.

However, for several decades we have heard environmental advocates moaning and hand wringing about our inability to recover endangered species, and more often than not blaming global warming as the threat to endangerment. The latter proposition is mostly horse shit. Over 3,000 species listed and only 3% of those have been recovered. Recovery efforts stalled out in the late 1990s. And today endangered species declines are augmented by a companion and massive decline in migratory birds arcing to centennial levels of depletion.  The two declines are related as we shall see. So perhaps we should take a magnifying glass to observe and dissect the dysfunctional aspects of the federal agencies’ problems.

First, I shall risk a broad brush declaration that USFWS and companion state and federal agencies have spent 35 years focused on regulatory applications and land acquisition as the principal instruments to foster recovery. Neither work, nor has the needle moved to propel recovery for three decades, despite millions of $ invested.

Second, much is made in Congressional testimony and environmental advocacy about the importance of recovery plans. If you have ever had the responsibility of trudging through these plans reading page after page of rote narrative, you will know they are not worth the paper they are written on. They represent bureaucratic churn in glorified narrative form. They are repetitive, overly reliant upon habitat protection as the be all end all solution and the key to recovery. Instead the first diagnosis, taking a page from medicine, should be to identify what is killing the species? What are their sources of mortality? I learned this lesson in the early 1980s with the California condor. Environmentalists screamed to protect habitat across thousands of acres from every mountain top and through every media outlet. When we started recovery there were 18 birds in the wild. Within a year we determined they were dying of lead poisoning from eating deer carcasses. Today there almost 700 condors throughout the West.

Third, achieving recovery on a scalable basis is a matter of math and geography. The math equation is pretty stark and simple. According to USFWS, 80% of endangered species habitat is found on private lands. 80%! Private landowners do not abide, actually loath, federal agencies trying to regulate them and tell them how to manage their lands in order to save species. This leads to the aphorism: “shoot, shovel, shut up.” And they do not want their lands purchased by government agencies. The geography of recovery from a strategic stand point is predominantly in three broad focal areas: Southeastern states, Texas and southern California. All of these three areas are predominantly in private land ownership.

Fourth, year after year environmental advocates in Congressional testimony demand that Congress appropriate more money to USFWS to recover species. This is a waste of time, effort, and represents financial malpractice. The USFWS budget for endangered species, pre DOGE, was +/-$140 million, and the bulk of that going to personnel. The predominant source of funding for endangered species recovery lies within the vaults of USDA agencies NRCS and FSA, which have over $3 billion for Working Lands for Wildlife and authorization to support landowner stewardship. Unfortunately USDA programs are so mismanaged that the average time from application to award of program dollars is three years, so think next administration for results on the ground! Current NRCS leadership is focused on the application of AI, which will not solve the problem of its inefficient and entrenched bureaucracy. However, at least these funds are both available to and targeted toward private farm, ranch, and forest landowners.

Fifth, the solution to recovery will not be found in application of the tenets of biology and wildlife management. There is no point in calling balls and strikes on biological functions to achieve recovery because you will never get to first base. The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) tried that for 15 years to restore the lesser prairie chicken, but efforts stalled because they did not focus on working with ranchers and private landowners. With 80% of endangered species habitat on private lands, you need to understand the market dynamics for landowners. The average age for farmers and ranchers is on the far side of low 60s, forest owners beyond 70, so the majority of our landowners are in the midst of intergenerational estate planning. Environmentalists are fond of beating the drums of the principals of ecology; everything is connected! So it is, but for landowners there is an equation of human ecology that comprises finances, bank statements, loans, the basics of economics and multi-year planning for crops, livestock breeding. In the private land market economics and interpersonal relations with peers are far more determinative than the biology of saving endangered species.

Sixth, the role of environmental organization litigants is a major impediment to recovery. Enviro’s have professionalized and legalized the strategy of moving the goal posts for recovery. In 1985, I encouraged the Reagan administration Interior Department leadership to form the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC) in order to coordinate the efforts of federal agencies (NPS, USFWS USFS, BLM, and states WY, MT, ID, and WA) for grizzly recovery efforts. In fifteen years IGBC increased grizzly populations in Yellowstone ecosystem from 180 to 700 bears and in 2007 USFWS proposed delisting. NRDC and other enviro litigants sued alleging climate change impacts on white bark pine, a marginal food source, and derailed recovery and delisting. If you never get to success and cannot announce recovery, you lose public support. Now ranchers have to accommodate grizzly bears on their front porch and stalking rural schoolyards. Meanwhile, elite metropolitan groups from NYC to San Francisco fund organizations like NRDC, Sierra Club, and CBD that repeatedly impede species recovery.

Seventh, after 30 years of relying on regulatory and land acquisition policies as the only arrows in the quiver of recovery policy, outreach and engagement with landowners, never a strong component to begin with, has shrunk and shriveled to ineffectiveness. One example of how outreach to private landowners can work is my nonprofit platform, www.landcan.org. The site lists federal, state, nonprofit, and for-profit service providers, with more than 250,000 listings covering the full range of “human ecology” services, from government programs to consulting foresters, range consultants, tax and estate lawyers, and veterinarians. In 2024, the platform had 933,000 users, and in 2025 more than 944,000. Bear in mind there are only 1.9 million farms and ranches in the United States and roughly 10 million forest owners, making LandCAN the largest compendium of forest services on the internet. Yet for 16 of the last 18 years LandCAN has received no funding support from either USDA or Interior. That fact underlines the federal agencies’ antipathy toward private land ownership.

Even within the agencies this same mindset dominates. In the early 1990s, when I was CEO of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), I gave grants to create the Partners for Wildlife program in USFWS. It became the only outreach program in the Interior Department focused on engaging private landowners, and I secured a Congressional appropriation to mainline the program within USFWS. In Trump -45, Secretary Bernhardt gave the Partners program a $1million plus up. However, under the Biden administration, USFWS leadership neutered the program and moved the funding to Refuges as part of their bureaucratic empire building for public land, so today the program is ineffectual for endangered species recovery. More broadly speaking, in USFWS today there are hardly a dozen individuals who even know how to recover species. Back in the 1970s, when I served in the Secretary’s office at Interior and in USFWS’ Office of Endangered Species, I helped drive species recoveries by taking them out of USFWS’ hands and giving them to entrepreneurial nonprofits that repeatedly led the way. We did this with Peregrine falcons going to Tom Cade and the Peregrine Fund, with Whooping Cranes going to George Archibald’s Crane Foundation and Rod Drewein’s whooper surrogate project, with California condors to Los Angeles and San Diego zoos for breeding, with Tina Millburn/Morris bald eagle hacking project at Cornell. In each case private sector expertise lead the way to recovery.

Eighth, yesterday, 9 March was the 250^th anniversary of Adam Smith’s publication of Wealth of Nations. In his Unleash Prosperity daily blog, Steve Moore quoted from Smith to celebrate his impact. “Prosperity Smith argued, does not flow primarily from royal decrees, bureaucratic planning, or the accumulation of gold and silver. It emerges from decentralized decisions of millions of individuals pursuing their own improvement within a framework of justice and robust competition.” To bring this up to date, we no longer have kings, but we do have Secretaries of USDA and Interior, who seldom coordinate policies and implementation strategies. We do have bureaucracies that are sclerotic, woke and antipathetic to the current administration. To achieve recovery we do need to engage the decentralized millions of private landowners at scale so that their stewardship and land improvements lead the way to free-market implementation of recovery efforts across out landscapes. As Nobelist Leon Hurwicz wrote: “A decentralized capital resource allocation system is the ONLY system capable of satisfying the five philosophical ideals of: Equity, Efficiency, Stability, Freedom and Privacy. And this is exactly what people want. True capitalism is the least rotten apple in the barrel of alternative resource allocation systems.” Bureaucratic antipathy toward the private sector and private landowners is a major impediment to species recovery. These same issues apply to the marine environment today where fishermen offer greater expertise to facilitate species recovery thanks to new technologies than the bureaucrats in NOAA and NMFS.

So broadly speaking today, we stand at a potential turning point after 30 plus years of regression of effectiveness and retardation of species recovery efforts. Is there a path forward and an array of solutions to re-energize species recovery? I think so.

First, we need to empower state fish and game/wildlife agencies. States today are even farther behind the curve of engaging private landowners than the federal government agencies. Only Texas has a robust private land program because I gave Texas Parks and Wildlife grants in 1992 to create a Private Land Division that now has management plans on over 33 million acres. Missouri and Georgia have rudimentary programs, but most state agencies do not have capacity for engaging landowners at scale. Recently (Oct 2025) the Southeast Fish and Wildlife Agencies (SEAFWA) created a committee to investigate empowering states to engage landowners in conservation. This process needs acceleration and support from federal agencies and Congress, and yes support means funding. States today are closer to local landowner communities; they tend to have better relations with state based corporations. They have more boots on the ground and better field biology skills than federal agencies. Local understanding of geographies and land owner relationships are imperatives for conservation success on the ground. This is the reason LandCAN has built 13 state LandCAN sites to date.

Second, rancher and Ag land trusts are critical for endangered species recovery and recovery of grassland bird species. In the late 1990s, as CEO of NFWF, I gave the lead grants to start the California Rangeland Trust, Colorado Ag and Cattleman’s Land Trust, and Texas Ag Land Trust. Today, in terms of acreage in conservation, these three land trusts are the largest in their respective states. The Malpais Borderlands Group in southern AZ and NM was also a repeat grantee and has worked assiduously to recover endangered species on over a million acres. Other localized rancher land trusts like Lemhi Valley Regional land Trust have made significant conservation contributions. Ranchers today are far better stewards and conservationists than the wealthy metropolitans on East and West coasts funding litigating environmental groups who are actually the greatest retardants to conservation in our world. Aldo Leopold is the patron saint of much of our environmental community because he advocated for wilderness areas in degraded western landscapes. However, some 80 years ago he wrote: “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who serves the public interest”… and “the geography of conservation is such that most of the best land will always be held privately for agricultural production. The bulk of responsibility for conservation thus necessarily devolves upon the private custodian, especially the farmer.” His age advice has been mostly ignored for the past 40 years, just as this epistle will likely fall on deaf ears. The same approach applies to forestry. Between 2000 and 2005 we put 1.1 million acres of Maine forests in conservation easements. These forests remain in private ownership, paying taxes, providing jobs and active forest management.

Third, corporate engagement has enormous potential. During my years running NFWF we created Exxon’s Save The Tiger program which contributed to doubling India’s tiger population in two decades. We initiated a major Gulf of Mexico, now Gulf of America, marine conservation program with Shell, and an endangered species recovery program with Chevron, and a nationwide wetlands restoration program with DOW Chemical among many examples. Corporate America took a detour into climate change infatuation and decarbonization for several decades and that did little except degrade their investment capital. I have spoken with Secretary Wright DOE about his partnering with Secretary Burgum DOI to create an oil/gas industry leading effort to fund endangered species recovery. I guarantee this will be more effective than current USFWS programs. It is high time to bring corporate America back to a common sense approach to conservation and a focus on endangered species conservation.

Fourth, USDA and DOI agencies need to coordinate investments and recovery strategies on a monthly basis. Perhaps the most successful federal species recovery program exists at the DOW, a legacy of Bush -45 and Rumsfeld leadership to create the REPI program. Close coordination by USDA and DOI with DOW is critical and should be formalized. An increased focus and implementation of forest management to reduce wildfires and resuscitate forest ecosystems is necessary. All our forests were burned and managed by Native Americans for 5,000 years. Environmental advocacy for wilderness areas and road less areas has given us 50 years of burnable fuel loads leading to catastrophic fires. All the forest endangered species of the Pacific Northwest, including spotted owls, lynx, wolverines, and fishers, need open spaces and grasslands intermixed with our forests. Once again the environmental litigants and advocates have forest management all wrong and have adversely effected species recovery.

Fifth, USDA and Interior should be investing in and collaborating with LandCAN rather than perpetuating the demonstrably failed policies of the Obama and Biden administrations when it comes to engaging rural Americans. LandCAN already has an endangered species recovery platform that averages 5,000 users per month.

Finally, Secretary Burgum at Interior has been focused on bringing us into an energy renaissance in conjunction with Secretary Wright at DOE, and God bless them for that! Another focus of Burgum’s is wildfire control, which as I have already alluded, impacts a number of species recovery efforts. With greater cooperation with the Secretaries of USDA and DOW, and a few strokes of his pen, Secretary Burgum can bring about a comparable renaissance in endangered species recovery.

If you believe conservation succeeds when private landowners are engaged and empowered, please consider supporting the work of LandCAN. The Land Conservation Assistance Network connects farmers, ranchers, and forest owners with the programs, professionals, and tools they need to steward their land and protect wildlife across America. Your support helps keep these resources freely available nationwide. Donations are tax-deductible and can be made here: https://www.landcan.org/Donate