Congress Urged to Fully Fund U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Restore Workforce

The Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and more than 150 conservation groups today urged Congress to significantly increase the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s budget for endangered species conservation from $299 million to $870 million. The nearly three-fold increase would more accurately reflect the agency’s dire staffing and resource needs.

“Every lost biologist is a lost lifeline for an endangered animal or plant,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity. “You can’t run an agency on pink slips and a shoestring budget. If Congress is serious about stopping the extinction crisis, it must rebuild and fully fund the Fish and Wildlife Service before more species disappear on its watch.”

Unprecedented mass firings and buyouts have resulted in historic losses of Service staff during the second Trump administration. Today’s letter also calls on Congress to require a minimum number of full-time employees to lock in the needed workforce, protect it from politically driven cuts and give the Service the ability to carry out its statutory duties.

The letter notes that after just one year in office, the Trump administration has “gutted the federal workforce so severely that it will take decades for agencies to recover.” The Service alone lost at least 18% of its staff nationwide, including more than 500 biologists working on the ground to protect and recover some of our most imperiled animals and plants and the wild places they live.”

In addition to staff cuts, the Service’s listing budget was gutted by 36% for the current fiscal year, severely hamstringing the program in charge of determining which animals and plants deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act.

“No price can be put on extinction,” said Mary Beth Beetham, director of legislative affairs at Defenders of Wildlife. “The amount of funding needed by our expert wildlife agencies to properly implement the Endangered Species Act pales in comparison to the loss of even one single species which can never be replaced. Congress must move quickly to provide the necessary resources before our beloved wildlife suffers permanent loss.”

The Service only receives about one-third of the funding it needs to carry out its mission of protecting endangered species and their habitats. As a result, hundreds of endangered species receive less than $1,000 a year for their recovery, with many receiving no funding from the Service at all.

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The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.8 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.