Latest news with #USFWS
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal officials won't take action on Kansas wildlife refuge's lost water
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established Quivira National Wildlife Refuge in 1955 to protect migratory birds, pictured here in 2011. (Dan Severson/USFWS) TOPEKA — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will not allocate water in 2026 to a Kansas wildlife refuge that serves as a key destination for hundreds of species of migrating birds. Kansas Republican U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran in an Aug. 14 announcement applauded the service's decision to take no action to honor water rights for the Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, a more than 22,000-acre marsh and sand prairie in central Kansas. Federal officials made the same decision in 2020 and again in 2023, despite a report from Kansas regulators that found the refuge received insufficient amounts of water in two out of every three years between 2008 and 2021. 'I met with FWS Administrator Brian Nesvik and emphasized the need for long-term solutions led by stakeholders at the local level, and I am pleased by the recognition of the progress that is being made,' Moran said in a news release. Moran did not specify what progress entails, but he said the service acknowledged a Kansas Department of Agriculture group's conservation efforts. A 2016 analysis determined that irrigators upstream from Quivira were infringing on its state water rights, which entitle it to more than 14,000 acre-feet of water each year, equivalent to about 4.6 billion gallons. Irrigators reduce the groundwater in Rattlesnake Creek, which flows into the refuge. Conservationists say lower flows threaten endangered species. In 2024, the refuge reportedly used none of its allocated water for the first time since 2017, according to state water rights data. In 2023, it used 45 acre-feet. U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, a Republican representing Kansas' 4th District, wrote a letter in February to U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking for assurance that the department wouldn't call for water allocation for Quivira. 'Agriculture is the basin's primary industry, generating millions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue,' Estes said. 'Losing the ability to irrigate crops would reduce these revenues by tens of millions of dollars, forcing many of these already struggling family-run farms to exit the industry entirely.' Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
07-08-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
MORNING GLORY: Trump needs to clean house at environmental agencies abusing property rights
In Tuesday's "Morning Glory" column, I laid out a small part of the abuses perpetrated on farmers, ranchers and landowners by the application of the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) to private property by the 9,000 bureaucrats of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS.) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has another 12,000 bureaucrats and they regulate marine species. The USFWS is by far the worst offender of private property rights, but NOAA as well as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACOE) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also contribute to the giant, tangled tumbleweed of regulations, rules, "guidance," incompetence and environmental extremism that have paralyzed major infrastructure projects as well home and apartment building projects across the country. Three executive orders from President Trump would greatly assist the farmers, ranchers and landowners who have been shut down from using their land in whole or part because of the listing of one or more of the 1,300 species and subspecies listed as "endangered" or "threatened" by the USFWS and NOAA. The first EO would direct Secretary Burgum to immediately remove from the list of "endangered" or "threatened" species and subspecies all mammals, birds, crustaceans and insects that were added to the list because of the application of the criteria that looks at the "projected decline" in "critical habitat" or "occupied or potentially occupied habitat." This criteria for declaring a species or subspecies on the basis of "projected decline" of its habitat is guesswork, not "science," and the application of this criteria has been repeatedly abused by bureaucrats for the past three decades. A species or subspecies is considered "endangered" when it is in "imminent" danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range. A "threatened species" is one that is liable to become endangered in the foreseeable future. Both the terms "imminent" and "foreseeable" are accordion terms that can be stretched to absurd limits. The USFWS has done so, again and again. When the ESA passed in 1973 there were 78 species or subspecies listed as "endangered" or "threatened." Now there are 1,300. This extraordinary rise in the number of "protected" species is because the Service began using "projected future decline" in a species' or subspecies' range. Every species or subspecies that is on the list because of projected loss of habitat should be immediately removed from the list. Such "projections" are not "science" and indeed are often absurdly applied to achieve listing status. Very often the USFWS doesn't even account for permanently set aside parks and open spaces in its calculations of "projected habitat loss." If President Trump orders these removals from the ESA list be done immediately, he will focus the energy and budget of the bureaucracy on truly endangered and threatened species, and stop environmental extremists within the USFWS and NOAA and outside of those agencies from manipulating the list. The second executive order from President Trump should declare that private property impacted by ESA listings has been "taken" by the federal government and the owner must thus be compensated the fair market value of the land in question. The Constitution protects private property from uncompensated "takings," and the vast cost imposed by the ESA should be born by all taxpayers, not the few thousand landowners slammed by the Act. Finally, President Trump should order Secretary Burgum and USFWS Director Brian Nesvik to downsize both the USFWS and NOAA and do so on the basis of merit. Too many activists have infiltrated these agencies and use the ESA to block development, not protect species. They are also among the least responsive and most inefficient members of the federal workforce. It is long past time to clean house, beginning with new regional and area directors who are committed to the Constitution's explicit protection of private property, not their own private agendas or stopping development. The Pacific Legal Foundation does yeoman's work to protect the rights of all landowners, including ranchers, farmers and developers, but the scale of this problem has been growing exponentially for decades. Secretary Burgum and Director Nesvik would do well to hire from within the Pacific Legal Foundation for their senior staffs. That way lies growth and true protection of genuinely endangered or threatened species. And if that protection requires the sequestration of private property for months or years, the landowner should be paid immediately for their lost economic value of their land, as the Fifth Amendment requires. Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel's news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
Fox News
05-08-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
MORNING GLORY: Memo for President Trump, Secretary Burgum and Director Nesvik
Before the United States Senate broke for the summer and decamped from D.C., one nominee it did confirm was Brian Nesvik, who will lead the United States Fish and Wildlife Service ("USFWS.") The Senate voted last Friday by 54-43 to approve Nesvik, the onetime head of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. This is some great news for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum who needed some of his top-tier appointees finally put into their jobs —more than six months into President Trump's second term. Many other positions across the administration remain blockaded by a combination of obstructionist tactics by the Senate Democrats, as well as White House delay in nominations, paperwork filing by nominees, Senate committee hearings as well as votes, and a Senate work schedule which is leisurely as measured against the private sector even though this Senate has done more in the face of complete Democratic obstruction than recent iterations of the body. (Insiders among the Senate GOP promise they will change the Senate's absurd confirmation rules when they return on September 3. That's a great thing…if it happens. It should have happened immediately after the "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" passed the Senate.) Nesvik's appointment is crucial because the USFWS long ago blew past the intent of the federal Endangered Species Act ("ESA.") Congress has acquiesced in this bureaucratic mission creep for decades and decades as the agency grabbed more and more power over private landowners, but Burgum and Nesvik can take a sharp machete to the regulatory overgrowth. First, though, President Trump should use an executive order to delist all "species" and "subspecies" that landed on the ESA list by virtue of the criteria of "decline in the historic range of the species' or subspecies' habitat." The USFWS uses this metric to list species and subspecies like the California gnatcatcher (a bird) or the San Diego fairy shrimp (a crustacean) or the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly (an insect) as "endangered" or "threatened." This metric of "projected future habitat loss" is not "science." It is politics and environmental extremism dressed up as "science." It works this way. First, the Service identifies a "species" or a "subspecies" which it wants to "study" (and the definition of subspecies is itself a dodgy process of questionable legitimacy in the original law.) Then the Service proclaims the "historic range" of that subspecies —let's say 10,000 square miles. Then "scientists" at the USFWS calculate how much of that 10,000 square miles has been developed for buildings, homes, parks, roads and reservoirs as well as anything else man-made and subtracts that area from the original "historic range." If we are dealing with Southern California's coastal regions, or the Bay Area, or the area around Las Vegas or Denver for example, a great deal of development of all sorts has taken place in those regions in the past 200 years. The USFWS then subtracts the developed part of the historic range over the past 200 years from the original historic range and then projects the same pace of development out decades or centuries. Thus, if the 10,000 square miles of original "historic habitat range" had seen 7,500 square miles developed in the past 200 years, the Service concludes that the pace of past development which saw 75% of the historic range of the subspecies used by humans is going to continue into the future. Thus, the bureaucrats conclude that the 2,500 square miles will be reduced by 75% in the next two hundred years leaving only 600 square miles of historic range. The same calculation is then applied to the 600 square miles over the next 200 years etc. The conclusion that the species or subspecies is "endangered" or "threatened" by habitat loss is baked into the process. The species or subspecies that is endangered by "habitat loss" is placed on the endangered species list, and all land which is occupied by that subspecies is off-limits to development without one of two federal permits —a Section 10(a) permit from the USFWS or a Section 7 permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ("USACOE"). Indeed, sometimes the career bureaucrats at the agency attempt to assert that if the habitat in question could potentially be occupied by the species or the subspecies, it too is off limits to development without a permit. Most permits applied for by private landowners are never granted, and are usually abandoned or made so expensive in terms of mitigation demanded by the USFWS that they end up combined into one big permit application that creates a new regional bureaucracy, which adds another layer of red tape and extreme costs to the private landowners' plans. It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. I retired from this area of law in 2015 after practicing in it on behalf of landowners for nearly 3 decades. It's only gotten worse since I left practice to teach law and broadcast. The ESA isn't the only reason we have a housing shortage in many parts of the country and that critical infrastructure rarely gets built and never on budget or on time. States have their own versions of the ESA as well and their own versions of the Clean Water Acts and a host of other hurdles to construction. But this maze of species and subspecies law and regulations is backed up by criminal penalties of fines and years in jail for every individual member of the subspecies disturbed —not killed, but even just disturbed (the technical legal term is "taken")— by a landowner acting without a permit. It's an outrageous and idiotic system and much of it rests on three giant leaps of logic: That the ESA was intended to regulate "subspecies," that the "science" behind declaring either a species or a "subspecies" is sound, and that "decline of historic range" is also a legitimate scientific metric. Hopefully President Trump, Secretary Burgum and Director Nesvik take aim at all three absurdities and, via executive order or rule-making, clear away hundreds of the 1,300 species and subspecies from the list of endangered and threatened species maintained by the Service. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration regulates the endangered or threatened species in the water though sometimes the USFWS and "NOAA" have overlapping jurisdiction.) Two other moves would greatly assist the pressing need for more housing of all varieties and for major infrastructure projects and safe forests and wild-lands. First, the Supreme Court should be on the lookout for a case that allows it to make sense out of a tangle of cases having to do with "regulatory takings," and fashion a new, coherent rule of black letter law to apply to such regulatory takings: If any level of government requires longer than 60 days to approve a landowner's plans for their private property, the government owes that landowner rent on a monthly basis. No more uncompensated "temporary" takings by regulation. The framers of the Constitution would be mortified by the extent the federal, state and local governments trample property rights which were explicitly protected by the Fifth Amendment from uncompensated takings, a prohibition applied to state and local governments by the 14th Amendment. Once government had to pay for its delay, the pace would pick up at every level of bureaucracy. Second, Burgum and Nesvik should take the initiative and publish "nationwide Section 10(a) permits" that allow for all fire-prevention clearing, harbor dredging, and pier and pipeline construction and prospectively for "SMRs" —"small modular reactors" that are the future of carbon-free energy production— regardless of impacts to all species and subspecies. These are all projects of enormous public benefit and almost all of them are held-up if not blocked completely by environmental extremists using the ESA as a disguise for their no-growth, anti-human agendas. President Trump, Secretary Burgum and Director Nesvik cannot make America great again if they can't expedite big new infrastructure projects or prevent vast destruction by wildfires that use uncleared land for fuel or stop the quiet theft of private property by the leviathan of the giant combination of federal, state and local government regulations. Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel's news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
Time of India
29-07-2025
- Time of India
Police dog helps catch passenger with unusual items stuffed in bags at US airport
The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently caught a South Korean passenger with "unusual haul", attempting to bring it into the country. The traveller, intercepted at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport , had items including raw sea cucumbers (a type of marine animal) and blood-soaked frogs , along with a few unidentified objects, raising serious concerns. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category This was first discovered by K-9 Buckie, a specially trained police dog. CBP posted about the findings on July 26 on X, revealing that the items are now with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) for identification. — CBP (@CBP) "Ribbit'ing discovery! CBP agriculture specialists and K9 Buckie at FlySEA uncovered an unusual haul from a passenger arriving from South Korea: bloody frogs, raw sea cucumbers, and other unidentified items. These items are now with the USFWS for identification," read the side note. Live Events CBP also posted two images, including the photo of the find and another featuring Buckie, an adorable yet sharp-nosed canine who helped CBP sniff out the suspicious items tucked away in the passenger's luggage. Buckie has become an internet sensation after the discovery. "Way to go, K9 Buckie!!! What is wrong with these people? I mean mentally. Bloody frogs and sea cucumbers. Who does that?" commented a user. "Why would anyone travel with that? What nefarious deeds were they up to?" wondered another. "Gross! What is wrong with these people and what diseases are they carrying around?!?" wrote a disgusted individual. Buckie received a lot of love from social media users. The common sentiment was, "Good boy, Buckie." A dog lover wrote, "Hope Buckie got a treat for his good work!"
Newsweek
10-07-2025
- General
- Newsweek
Rare White Birds Nearly Disappeared From US—Now They're Making a Return
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Once nearly having fallen into extinction, North America's tallest bird is now making a much awaited come-back. A new survey from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated a record-breaking 557 whooping cranes wintered around Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, on the Texas coast during the 2024–2025 season, the highest count recorded for this species. At least 41 of those cranes were reported to be juveniles, fresh new recruits from the breeding grounds in and around Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. "The 2024–2025 wintering grounds survey marks the first time that the Aransas-Wood Buffalo Population of whooping cranes has been estimated to exceed 550 individuals, a remarkable achievement for a species that once numbered only 21 individuals" said Matthew Butler, service biologist and lead author of the report, in a statement. "All whooping cranes today are descended from only 14 adults remaining on the Texas coast in 1941", he added. Above pictured are two whooping crane at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Above pictured are two whooping crane at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Mike Croyle/USFWS Thanks to decades of legal protection, habitat restoration and cross-border collaboration, the population has been growing steadily—about 4.33 percent a year. An additional 68 sightings were reported by service staff, conservation partners and community scientists beyond the refuge, in another record. However, there is a chance these may include birds accidentally recounted as they move in and out of the designated survey area. Whether or not these birds were already accounted for, their presence in new areas means that they are expanding their winter range. "These survey results are incredibly encouraging as they demonstrate the whooping crane continues to steadily recover from the brink of extinction," said Kevin McAbee, the Service's Whooping Crane Recovery Coordinator, in a statement. "The expanding range and steady population growth reflect the hard work and dedication of every partner working to conserve whooping cranes. Together, we are making a real difference for this iconic North American bird and preserving it for future generations." Whooping cranes live in family groups and frequent marshes, shallow lakes and lagoons. They usually feed on plants, shellfish, insects, fish and frogs. Generally safe from hunting and egg collection, their biggest threat—loss of wetlands—persists. While the survey was focused around Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, conservation efforts are in place throughout North America's Central Flyway—from the Texas coast, through the Great Plains of the United States, to the Canadian Prairies and the northern boreal forest. While the increasing numbers of whooping cranes is encouraging, conservation efforts are far from over—and the U.S Fish and Wildlife service says that it remains committed to ensuring the long-term survival of this species. Do you have a science story to share with Newsweek? Do you have a question about whooping cranes? Let us know via science@
