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Mr. MORAN. Mr. Chairman, first of all, I want to associate myself with my good friend from Oregon. I agree completely with everything he said, and I am going to agree with our subsequent speaker, Mr. Miller, who played an essential role in getting the original Endangered Species Act passed. It has been wildly successful, Mr. Chairman, preventing species extinction.
More than 99 percent of listed species still exist today. Species recovered under the Endangered Species Act are also off the charts. The latest analysis found that 90 percent of listed species are recovering at the rate specified by their Federal recovery plan.
Successful species delistings are also increasing--delistings. Five years ago this month, the Fish and Wildlife Service finalized its rule to remove the bald eagle from the endangered species list. What a success story.
But for those who want to open up even more of our public lands to resource extraction, the law is a major inconvenience. So a working group, comprised entirely of Republican Members of the House of Representatives, was established by the House leadership to come up with legislative proposals to weaken the act. Today's bill is drawn directly from those recommendations.
It would deem whatever data that States, local governments, and Indian tribes submit to the Federal Government as the best available science.
It would undermine the ability of public citizens to contribute to the efficacy of the act, and it would compel the Fish and Wildlife Service to put online all data, regardless of merit, regardless of whether it contains proprietary or private information, and notwithstanding the fact that to do so will provide poachers and criminals with a road map to further endanger endangered species.
Mr. Chairman, the net effect of this bill before us today would be to force the Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, to squander its limited conservation resources on meritless requirements to become tied up in legal challenges and to diminish its ability to protect endangered species.
I guess if this body can outlaw Federal agencies from using scientific findings related to climate change in their decisionmaking process, then it is no stretch of the imagination for this body to define what constitutes best available scientific and commercial data.
This bill states that data submitted by a State, tribal, or county government is automatically deemed as the best available scientific and commercial data. The quality of the data is immaterial. What matters is who is sending it.
Let me say that again a different way. The quality of the information that State, tribal, and local governments submit is irrelevant under this bill. The bill says it shall be deemed the best available scientific and commercial data. The Fish and Wildlife Service would be required to include this data, even if it is not the best, even if it were not developed by scientists, even if it were developed for purely commercial purposes, and even if it is contrary to fact. The Service would be forced to include it and it will, thus, alter its decisions on listings, recovery plans, and other policies related to the conservation of endangered species.
It is also unclear how the Service would resolve a situation where States, tribal, or county governments submit conflicting data.
This is no hypothetical situation. During hearings on the Endangered Species Act, one of the witnesses, a Mr. Tom Jankovsky, Commissioner of Garfield County, Colorado, was very critical of State officials for the information they were providing the Bureau of Land Management on sage grouse habitat.
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Mr. MORAN. Commissioner Jankovsky found the State maps inaccurate, overstating the area of sage grouse habitat. The map he commissioned for Garfield County showed 70 percent less habitat for sage grouse.
Whose map should the Federal Government accept as the best available science, the Colorado State map or Garfield County's? This bill gives equal weight to both.
Mr. Chairman, this is a bad bill, and no amendment can make it a good bill. It should be rejected.
Rather than addressing some of the compelling challenges that this Nation is confronting, we are wasting time on a bill that may pass the House but will go nowhere in the Senate and certainly will not become law. I urge its defeat.
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