Feds say nationwide recovery plan for wolves isn’t needed

Federal officials announced this week that they will not produce a nationwide recovery plan for gray wolves, a reversal that comes after officials decided such a plan is unnecessary.

In a 10-page document, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service detailed its decision to cancel work on the plan for wolves listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act, including those in the western two-thirds of Washington.

Officials have decided that the plan would not help conserve the wolves because “listing these entities is no longer appropriate,” according to the document.

The announcement does not remove federal protections from wolves, which are protected as threatened in Minnesota and endangered in the western two-thirds of Washington and Oregon and 42 other states.

But it signals that the administration does not believe wolves in those areas need protections.

The first Trump administration moved to delist the wolves in 2020. Protections were restored after a lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups resulted in a settlement that called for the national recovery plan.

In February 2024, the Biden administration announced it would begin work on the plan and release it by Dec. 12, 2025.

This week’s determination, signed on Monday by Gina Shultz, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s acting assistant director of ecological services, ends that effort.

It cites the 2020 status assessment that supported delisting wolves and says no new information gathered in the past five years warrants reconsidering that decision. Officials wrote that wolf populations are large enough and have enough genetic diversity to survive into the future.

Wolf advocates say the species is far from being recovered on the West Coast and in places like the southern Rocky Mountains. Collette Adkins, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement that the decision was disappointing.

“I’m appalled that Trump wants to strip gray wolves of federal protections and turn their management over to states that are dead set on killing them,” Adkins said.

Adkins said that courts have made clear that the species is not recovered, and that the center would challenge the administration’s decision.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation welcomed the news in a statement, saying that the decision simply matches the Fish and Wildlife Service’s findings in 2020 and that states are equipped to manage the predators.

“The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation maintains that state wildlife agencies can and should sustainably manage recovered wolf populations just as they manage elk, black bears, deer and other wildlife species,” the statement said.

Wolves in the Northern Rockies were delisted in 2011. In addition to the canines in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, that decision applies to the eastern third of Washington, where most of the state’s wolves live.

Their legal status is not without conflict, however. After the Biden administration found in 2024 that wolves in the northern Rockies did not need protections, wolf advocates sued, arguing that changes to laws in Idaho and Montana threaten the species’ recovery.

In August, a federal judge in Montana ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider protections for the delisted wolves.

In Northeast Washington, conflicts between wolves and livestock have boiled over into the courts.

A suit filed in state court last month by Washington Wildlife First stopped the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s efforts to kill a wolf from the Sherman Pack in response to a series of attacks on cattle.

The temporary restraining order in that case blocking the lethal removal ended last week. A judge in the case declined to order a preliminary injunction that would have prevented any future wolf killings. So far, WDFW has not announced plans to resume lethal removal efforts.

Meanwhile, the Kettle Range Conservation Group and two other organizations have sued the Colville National Forest over its grazing allotments across the 1.1 million acre national forest. They argue the allotments pose threats to the forest ecosystem and predator species like wolves.