Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEWHOUSE. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment that would prohibit the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from using funds to continue listing the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act in the States of Washington, Oregon, and Utah.

Mr. Chairman, this is a very serious issue of extreme importance to my home State of Washington, where the gray wolf is listed in the western two-thirds of the State, but is delisted in the eastern third. This fragmented listing means that there are no geographic barriers to prevent the wolves from traveling between listed and delisted areas, posing a risk to people living, farming, and ranching in the region.

Unfortunately, this issue should already have been settled. In June of 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a proposed rule to remove the gray wolf from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife under the Endangered Species Act.

The Fish and Wildlife Service made this determination after evaluating this ``classification status of gray wolves currently listed in the contiguous United States'' and found the ``best available science and commercial information indicates that the currently listed entity is not a valid species under the Act.''

On June 30 of this year, the Service released its response to a petition seeking to reclassify all gray wolves in the U.S. as a threatened species under ESA. In its response, the Fish and Wildlife Service states that it determined there was not substantial information to indicate that such a reclassification was warranted, and as a result, the Fish and Wildlife Service will take no further action on the petition.

Furthermore, the statutory purpose of ESA is to recover a species to the point where it is no longer considered endangered or threatened. The gray wolf is currently found in nearly 50 countries around the world, and the wolf specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature has placed the species in the category of ``least concern globally'' for risk of extinction.

Mr. Chairman, the proposed rule and other examples I have cited clearly show that a full delisting of the gray wolf is long overdue. Since wolves were first placed under ESA, uncontrolled and unmanaged growth of gray wolf populations has resulted in devastating impacts on hunting and ranching, as well as tragic losses to historically strong and healthy livestock and wildlife populations.

Mr. Chairman, the gray wolf population has grown substantially across its range and is now considered to be recovered; therefore, it does not merit protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The Pacific Northwest States are fully qualified to responsibly manage their gray wolf populations and are better suited than the Federal Government to meet the needs of local communities, ranchers, livestock, and wildlife populations.

My amendment today is simple. It would take steps that the Fish and Wildlife Service has already said are necessary and are supported by the best available scientific evidence and data. I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment, and I urge its adoption.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 1/2 minutes to my colleague from eastern Washington, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

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Mr. NEWHOUSE. Mr. Chair, I rise today to offer an amendment on an issue that is critical to livestock producers not just in my State and in my district, but across the whole country.

Last year, a group of folks in my area, environmental activists, sued several dairies in the Yakima Valley in Washington State, claiming that the dairies were responsible for ``open dumping'' under the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976--or, as it is most commonly referred to, RCRA--because of manure storage and management issues on their farms.

The big issue is what law the activists were suing the dairies under. There are many laws and regulations, both at the State and Federal level, which are appropriate mechanisms for protecting and ensuring our Nation's waters are kept clean, but the problem I see is that RCRA is not one of them.

RCRA was a law designed to govern solid wastes and prevent open dumping. The major application of this law is regulating landfills. It was never intended to regulate animal waste. In fact, the EPA, in its initial 1979 regulations for RCRA, expressed that the law ``does not apply to agricultural waste, including manure and crop residue, returned to the soil as fertilizers or soil conditioners.''

I don't know how much clearer we can get that manure storage and handling were not intended to be governed under this law. Unfortunately, though, a Federal judge in Spokane, Washington, agreed with the group and stretched the definition of ``solid waste'' to apply to manure nitrates, contrary to the law and Federal regulatory code, and held the dairies responsible for open dumping because of how they stored and handled animal waste.

Mr. Chair, my amendment does nothing to prevent EPA from enforcing the current regulations under RCRA. It does nothing to change the Clean Water Act rulemakings, nor does it prevent EPA from issuing or enforcing Clean Water Act regulations. All my amendment does is prevent EPA from issuing and expanding new regulations under RCRA that would reflect the interpretation of this current law.

Mr. Chair, no one is saying that livestock producers--like every American--don't share in the responsibility of good stewardship of our environmentand our resources. They certainly do. But there are appropriate laws and regulations intended to govern this, and there are ones that are not appropriate for this purpose.

Simply piling additional layers of regulation on producers and giving activists new litigation tools to target our Nation's farmers and ranchers is not what Congress had in mind when passing the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act. We, as Congress, have a responsibility to make that clarification, and that is what I am seeking to do with this amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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