Wildlife has little to show for staggering cost of Endangered Species Act

The Department of the Interior recently proposed significant changes to the rules implementing the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). As welcome as these changes will be if successfully implemented, one aspect of the law has gone unnoticed — its enormous costs. 

The costs of administering and recovering over 1,600 endangered and threatened animals and plants on the list have largely been ignored for decades. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has no standardized practices for cost accounting, does a haphazard job tracking costs, and in fact regularly engages in practices that conceal the total costs for each species.  

{mosads}Moreover, the economic impacts, especially to landowners burdened with heavy-handed requirements to provide habitat for listed species, are seldom considered and almost never investigated and itemized. 

This indifference to the costs of a massive federal regulatory program can be traced to a 1978 Supreme Court decision that concluded that Congress intended for endangered species to be saved from extinction “whatever the cost.” 

My organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has worked to identify the ESA’s costs to taxpayers, landowners, and the economy. Adjunct Fellow Rob Gordon found, “the costs for paperwork, federal and state agency expenditures, and recovery costs, amount to tens of billions of dollars.” But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Economic impacts are much greater and likely total hundreds of billions of dollars. 

The reason the costs to the economy are huge but not known in detail is that once FWS’s career bureaucrats tell landowners that they cannot use their property in various ways, such as no longer grazing animals on certain rangelands, they lose interest because the losses are borne entirely by the landowners.

Here are a few examples of identified and estimated costs. The baseline costs of designating the Red-Legged Frog in California were estimated at $44 million to $113 million. The total economic impacts from 2009 to 2030 were estimated to range from $159 million to $500 million. Estimated costs of protecting habitat for the Dusky Gopher Frog range from $102,000 to $34 million. The Arkansas Shiner, a fish, will cost $17 million to $36 million annually. 

These cumulative costs must be compared to the ESA’s record over 45 years of recovering populations of endangered wildlife. It’s poor to dismal. In another paper published the Heritage Foundation, Gordon shows many of the recent delistings of a number of species were not because they were recovered, as has been claimed by the Fish and Wildlife Service and by environmental pressure groups. Instead, many have been delisted either because they were extinct at the time of listing or were listed because of data error — that is, there were many more of the plants or animals than originally claimed at the time of listing. 

Interior must improve accounting methods for the costs of ESA listings and for the analyses of economic impacts. Incorporating these recommendations in the rule changes proposed will increase transparency and accountability and thereby lead to better informed decision-making.

Myron Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. He is the former head of President Trump’s EPA transition team.