Francisco Tharp

The War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and now, the War on Endangered Species. That’s right, it’s official once again: as far as endangered wildlife is concerned, the Bush administration is as scary as Dick Cheney with a shotgun. According to a Washington Post report printed Sunday, a whole heap of memos and documents indicate that Bush administration officials in the Fish and Wildlife Service (under the Department of Interior) have gone out of their way in recent years to make listing a species as endangered very hard.

You’ll have to read down the article a ways, but the juicy stuff is in there. For example, the Post reports that one memo read: Employees “can use info from files that refutes petitions but not anything that supports, per Doug” (That’s Douglas Krofta, head of the Endangered Species Program’s listing branch).

Additionally, agency officials “regularly overruled rank-and-file agency scientists’ recommendations to list new species,” the Post writes.

Fish and Wildlife is so behind on listing endangered species that WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit conservation group, filed a lawsuit on March 19 against Fish and Wildlife seeking the immediate protection of 681 plant and animal species. A WildEarth spokesperson called the Endangered Species Act “our nation’s ark,” and said that the Bush administration had essentially locked the door to it.

Compared to his father’s administration as well as President Clinton’s, George W. Bush and company have done remarkably little in terms of endangered species protection, according to the Post report. Since 2001, the big W has listed 59 species, compared to Clinton’s 521 and his Daddy’s 231. Of the current administration’s 59 listed species, not a single listing was requested by the administration. About 4 percent of the two previous administrations’ listings were initiated in-house.

Agency officials say they are so tied up in lawsuits they can’t move forward with listings. Then again, they’re only tied up in lawsuits because they never moved forward with listings.

Apparently the agency did have time to change the way they assess certain animal populations, like jaguars and wolverines. Because these two species range out of the U.S., and because they currently don’t have much of a population within our borders (although historically they did), the agency argued that it would not benefit the animals to list them.

Arizona bald eagles also got the short end of the stick when science–yes, good old objective science–was manipulated in 2006.

While the Post does have fresh documentation, the story is old news. The National Wildlife Federation reported on similar issues in 2004.