House Subcommittee Oversight Hearing About ESA Consultation Impediments

Last week a House subcommittee about the Endangered Species Act and the disruptive impact that its cumbersome consultation requirements can have on economic development and public safety projects. Pacific Legal Foundation Attorney Jonathan Wood testified at the hearing and shares more about what his message was

Wood: "The main point that I tried to explain to the subcommittee was that because far too many projects with a trivial federal nexus and a minor environmental impact must go through some form of consultation. There is essentially too much traffic on the highway — the big major projects that deserve scrutiny, the agencies doesn't have the resources or the time to do it. The only way to actually fix that is to reduce all of the minor projects that Congress never intended to go through this burdens and process that do today because the federal government simply regulates permits and funds far more than it did 40 years ago."

Wood continues

Wood: "There was no push back on that basic point. And frankly I don't think there can be. Defenders of Wildlife study found that almost 90,000 projects went through consultation in the first seven years of the Obama administration and exactly zero of them posed a jeopardy risk to species. Tens of thousands of these projects go through the process every year even though all they require is a Clean Water Act Permit and happen to be in an area where a species has some critical habitat. We're talking about a lot of minor projects that have almost no impact on endangered species but are delayed for an extremely long period of time and eat up the agencies' resources for no reason."