Feds announce plan to give grizzly bear management authority to states

The federal government has announced plans to shift management authority for threatened grizzly bears to state wildlife agencies.

But unlike past attempts to give states control, this proposal doesn’t involve removing Endangered Species Act protections for the bears.

The Department of the Interior announced Tuesday its plans to amend a Biden-era rule to “increase management flexibility for grizzly bears in areas where the species has met, and in many cases exceeded, federal recovery benchmarks.”

The proposal would revise a January 2025 rule put forward in the waning days of the Biden administration. The Trump administration’s changes are detailed in a 62-page document that’s set to be published in the Federal Register on Friday. It will be out for public comment until Aug. 17.

The rule that would be revised deals with exceptions to the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on “take” – defined in the law as harassing, harming, trapping or killing a protected animal. Exceptions listed in the document include relatively routine actions like relocating or hazing bears that are too close to people, or capturing bears for research.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing giving states and tribal entities more power to decide when actions like those are appropriate. State or tribal wildlife managers would enter agreements with the federal agency that would give them the additional flexibility as long as population benchmarks are met. State and tribal entities would still have to report their actions to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the new proposal at a press conference in southwest Montana on Tuesday, where he was joined by the governors of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. In a statement sent after the press conference, Burgum said his agency’s decision is about “returning conservation leadership to the Western states instead of Washington bureaucrats.”

A coalition of conservation groups – including the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wyoming Wildlife Federation, and the Property and Environment Research Center – issued a statement lauding the decision as a “historic conservation win.”

Others are worried that the decision will result in more dead grizzly bears.

Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation program legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement that she was “deeply disappointed that the Trump Administration is trying to make it easier to kill imperiled grizzly bears.

“Grizzlies shouldn’t be killed at the whim of the livestock industry while it exploits our public lands for its own personal profit,” Zaccardi said.

Jake Li, the vice president of conservation policy for the Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement that the proposed rule leaves key questions unanswered. He said the document “does not explain important details of how the Service will determine whether additional management flexibility is warranted.”

There were once as many as 50,000 grizzly bears in the Lower 48 states. Their numbers were decimated by overhunting and government bounty programs bent on eradicating them.

They have been protected as threatened since 1975. Conservation efforts have helped the species grow since then, and there are now roughly 1,900 grizzlies in the Lower 48.

Most of them live along the Northern Continental Divide in Montana and in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Smaller populations exist in the Selkirk Mountains of northeast Washington and North Idaho and in the Cabinet Mountains of far northwest Montana.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has tried multiple times to delist the Yellowstone ecosystem grizzlies only to be thwarted by lawsuits from environmental groups.

Under the Biden Administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed managing the Lower 48 bears as a single population rather than a group of subpopulations.

The Trump Administration’s changes would apply across the entire Lower 48. It would not apply to any experimental populations, such as the one proposed for the North Cascades.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife issued a statement on the proposal on Wednesday, saying it had a chance to review the draft rule before it was announced.