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Shortchanging America's Wildlife Refuges

March 16, 2007

The funding shortfall that has afflicted national parks for years has finally become embarrassing enough to prod our elected leaders into acting. In his proposed 2008 budget, President Bush has proposed a budget increase of nearly $260 million. It’s about time.

Less well known is the funding gap afflicting our national wildlife refuges, a system of habitat sanctuaries initiated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. In many ways, the wildlife refuges are in even worse shape than the parks. Refuges across the nation are cutting and juggling staff to try to keep up with rising costs. Over the next three years, the Fish and Wildlife Service plans to chop 20 percent of the refuge work force.

Refuges are reducing or dropping environmental education and species recovery programs. Projects to control destructive pest species and restore wetlands will be eliminated. Law enforcement is going by the boards. Habitat management is not getting the attention that it should.

Many refuges have no staff at all. For example, nearly half the 64 refuges in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific region will have no personnel when planned staff cuts are completed.

TR would not be happy. And neither should anyone who cherishes our country's wildlife heritage.

President Bush has proposed a modest $12 million increase in the refuges’ budget, to $394 million, but the increase hardly begins to chip away at the $3 billion backlog of unfunded needs.

A bipartisan group of congressmen, led by New Jersey Republican Jim Saxton, is asking the administration to pony up $452 million for the refuges in the 2008 budget, a 15 percent increase over the president's budget request.

If their push is successful, it would be a start towards reversing unconscionable neglect of irreplaceable natural treasures of wetlands, forests, grasslands, deserts, estuaries, and other biomes that harbor hundreds of charismatic species and thousands of less celebrated species that keep ecosystems in working order. Keeping this legacy intact is a duty that today’s generation owes to its unborn descendants.