Another Team Trump effort to roll back threatened species protections is in the works

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/4/6/1754726/-Another-Team-Trump-effort-to-roll-back-threatened-species-protections-is-in-the-works

Another Team Trump effort to roll back threatened species protections is in the works
Hunter
Daily Kos Staff
Friday April 06, 2018 · 5:10 PM EDT


Back somewhere in the bowels of Team Trump, yet another effort to roll back environmental protections that land developers and extraction companies don't like appears to be underway. And this one would be a big one: the axing of a rule that provides protections for several hundred of America's threatened species.

The proposal's obscure name -- "Removal of Blanket Section 4(d) Rule" -- refers to protections covering approximately 300 animal and plant species, such as the northern spotted owl and manatee, that are at risk of becoming endangered.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has for 40 years used the blanket rule to cover the majority of threatened species, the category considered at risk of endangerment under the Endangered Species Act.

A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service told CNN that to suggest the rule would overturn the protections is inaccurate. But the spokesman, Gavin Shire, would not elaborate about how that characterization was incorrect or what the proposal calls for, and he declined to provide a copy of the document.

So the official Trump appointee-crew position is that it doesn't do that, and you're not allowed to know what it does do, and you're not allowed to read the proposed changes to figure it out yourself.

The Trump team has been aggressive in their rollback of protections for threatened and endangered species. Trump's budget proposals have, of course, targeted federal agencies that enforce such protections. Last fall, they rejected 25 species for endangered or threatened status.

And, just a few weeks ago, a Ryan Zinke-appointed "advisory council" consisting of trophy hunters, gun manufacturers, and we-kid-you-not someone who "co-owns a private New York hunting preserve with President Donald Trump's adult sons" had their first meeting inside the Interior Department headquarters where they aggressively defended the import of lion, elephant and other trophies as a necessary monetization of those species.

The only hinderance to the Trump team efforts to erase decades of past environmental protections appears to be that even Republican lawmakers are wary of budget cuts as steep as the ones he proposes—those agencies provide jobs in a great many rural Republican districts, after all—and when, as with the import of elephant trophies, Trump himself gets wind of how bad one of the proposals make him look and attempts a vague public waffle on the subject. But that's not much hinderance at all, and Zinke and other Trump appointees seem to be well aware that their most valuable tool in dismantling these regulations is to dodge telling the public they're doing it.

It's a good case for formalizing many of these protections as laws, rather than administration-interpreted regulations. Perhaps a future Congress will take that up.