House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (UT-01) issued the following statement in response to a series of administrative initiatives put forward today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that are designed to increase transparency, expand stakeholder input, and improve the science used to develop listing determinations under the Endangered Species Act.

“The Obama Administration admitted today that the process by which Endangered Species Act listing determinations are made is insufficient, and then asked the American people to trust them to fix the problem. I don’t buy it.  

“The Committee welcomes the call from the Administration for the need to institute greater collaboration with states and greater transparency in listing decisions, but actions speak loader than words. Increasingly under this Administration, ESA designations have been driven not by sound science and citizen input but litigation from national special interest environmental groups. It’s a policy that has consistently led to agenda-driven decisions that disregard states and science.  

“We’ve been calling upon the Obama Administration for years to engage with Congress and address the same exact failures that Fish and Wildlife Service now claims to fix.  It is my hope that the Administration’s admission of these failures isn’t just a press release designed to assuage these concerns, and instead serves as a starting point for a true reform of a law that is badly needed.”