Congressional Western Caucus

Floor Speech

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Mr. GIANFORTE. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Washington for yielding. He has been a leader in our efforts to reform the Endangered Species Act and to return management of wolves back to the States.

I also thank the chairman of the Western Caucus, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar). Congressman Gosar has been instrumental in putting together this package of 17 bills to modernize the Endangered Species Act.

I wish we were here tonight to celebrate the successful recovery of the grizzly bear in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and elsewhere. The great news is the grizzly has recovered. Unfortunately, constant litigation has prevented the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from delisting the bear and returning management to the States.

I brought Secretary Bernhardt of the Department of the Interior to meet with families, ranchers, and local leaders in Choteau, Montana, just last fall. Parents told us how they put bars on their windows because the grizzly bears were looking in their children's bedrooms. One mom told me of a grizzly bear that chased her into her home when the bear heard the sound of her child crying.

At the point bears view children as a food source, we need to make changes. We have to put human safety ahead of the recovered grizzly bear.

Misuse and abuse of the Endangered Species Act are also shutting down responsible forest management. Every forest service project in Montana seemingly ends up in court. The result: We are unable to manage our forests, improve wildlife habitat, and reduce the severity of wildfires.

We must put commonsense guardrails on the Endangered Species Act. We must restore it to its original purpose of recovering species, not serving as a tool for frivolous lawsuits from extreme special interest groups that work to shut down critical projects in our State.

To address these abuses of the ESA, I introduced the Less Imprecision in Species Treatment Act, or the LIST Act. The LIST Act helps modernize the ESA. The LIST Act empowers the Fish and Wildlife Service to promptly act on sound, established science to delist species that have recovered--and that should be our goal.

The bill allows the Fish and Wildlife Service to reverse listings that were made due to bad data, and the bill prohibits abuses of the listing process. It will ban those who intentionally submit false information from submitting listing petitions for 10 years.

These are commonsense reforms. I am proud to sponsor the LIST Act and support the rest of the package to better protect species, increase collaboration, and improve forest health.

These pieces of legislation focus efforts on recovering species native to the U.S. They ensure that data used to make listing decisions is publicly available on the internet, and they promote voluntary wildlife conservation agreements and candidate conservation agreements with assurances.

We can and must modernize the Endangered Species Act to work better, and the Western Caucus has offered a path forward.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Washington State for his leadership on this.

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