Environmentalists file lawsuit seeking national gray wolf recovery plan

The battle over whether the federal government should draft a nationwide recovery plan for gray wolves is back in court.

On Tuesday, the Center for Biological Diversity sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its decision to end work on the national recovery plan that a court ordered as a result of a previous lawsuit from the center.

A national recovery plan would describe the work needed to restore gray wolves in states where they are protected under the Endangered Species Act, including the western two-thirds of Washington and Oregon.

In 2024, the Fish and Wildlife Service promised to finish a recovery plan by Dec. 12, 2025. Instead, the agency published a finding in November that federal protections for wolves are “no longer appropriate” and that a recovery plan was not necessary.

The suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., argues that move and the decades-long absence of a nationwide plan violate the Endangered Species Act, and asks the court to once again require the agency to write one.

Collette Adkins, a senior attorney for the center, said in a statement that the suit merely asks the Trump administration to “do its job” and comply with the law, and that doing so would help restore the wild canines.

“Wolves are so important to America’s biodiversity, and they deserve a plan that guides conservation in places where they’re struggling, like the West Coast and southern Rocky Mountains,” Adkins said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment.

Gray wolves once roamed much of North America but the species was decimated by poisoning, trapping and government-funded bounty programs. Populations hung on in Canada and the Great Lakes region while the species essentially disappeared from the West.

Federal protections arrived in the 1970s. A reintroduction program in the 1990s returned them to central Idaho and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and wolves have since expanded into new parts of the West. Their return to Eastern Washington was confirmed in 2008.

Congress delisted wolves in the Northern Rockies in 2011. That delisting covered wolves in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, part of Utah and the eastern third of Oregon and Washington.

The first Trump administration briefly delisted gray wolves in 2020. A lawsuit from a coalition of environmental groups got that decision reversed.

Gray wolves are still listed as endangered across the rest of the West. In Minnesota, they are listed as threatened.

Since the species gained protections, federal officials have drafted recovery plans for three specific areas, including the Northern Rockies. In its lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity argues that falls short of what’s required by law and what the species needs.

The suit argues that full wolf recovery “will not be accomplished in the absence of a comprehensive recovery plan to guide its conservation.”