Geico gecko science

Maybe it's an indication of how far we've come that the more recent scandals involving government interference in science have been greeted with a "so what?" attitude generally. On the other hand the last few scandals to hit the news really weren't that notable. This one might be different:

A top-ranking official overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service at the Interior Department rode roughshod over agency scientists, and decisions made on her watch may not survive court challenges, investigators within the Interior Department have found.

Their report, sent to Congress this week by the department’s inspector general, does not accuse the official, Julie A. MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks, of any crime. But it does find that she violated federal rules when she sent internal agency documents to industry lobbyists.

Sending internal agency documents to industry lobbyists is actually quite a serious charge.

In recent years, agency lawyers reported, 75 percent of the Western offices’ findings on endangered-species status reviews and critical-habitat determinations were sent to Washington without any assurance from career lawyers and biologists that they were valid. Court challenges from both industry and environmentalists are a regular occurrence at the fish and wildlife agency. Making decisions that are vulnerable increases the risk that time-consuming, labor-intensive scientific and regulatory work must be redone.

Sounds like she was clearly giving one "side" a leg-up here. Bush promised to give more "local" control over policy decisions in Washington and though some of the "industry" can certainly be considered "local" I'm not quite sure if voters really wanted to trample over the rights of other "locals" who might actually, you know, care about endangered species.

The report, citing a lawyer in the Sacramento office, noted that Ms. MacDonald lobbied for a decision to combine three different populations of the California tiger salamander into one, thus excluding it from the endangered-species list, and making the decision legally vulnerable. A federal district judge overturned it in 2005., saying the decision was made “without even a semblance of agency reasoning.”

Uhm yeah, salamanders generally don't hop in their cars to visit their girlfriends like the Geico gecko does. If they're separated and their populations are too small to sustain themselves, they'd be considered endangered.

When the inspector general asked her “why she ignored or discounted” legal opinions from the regional offices, the report said, “MacDonald replied it was a matter of policy, it was what worked best, and it was the result of the risk balancing that takes place” between pursuing policy goals and ensuring decisions have an adequate basis.

She also denied giving preferential treatment to a California Farm Bureau lobbyist who was a friend, or to any of his clients.

The inspector general also found that Ms. MacDonald had sent internal government documents by e-mail to a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation — a property-rights group that frequently challenges endangered-species decisions.

She twice sent internal Environmental Protection Agency documents — one involving water quality management — to individuals whose e-mail addresses ended in “chevrontexaco.com,” the report said.

I'm sure wingnuts will counter with something like 'geez, it only happened a couple of time' and that the good she did for industry far outweighs a little harm to some salamander no one ever heard about, but it's this type of policy repeated over and over again that eventually degrades our environment and eventually affects us all.

Aside: It looks like the administration wants to gut the endagered species act anyway, so possibly any hearings on this topic will be moot since this will become common practice soon:

In some ways, the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That's fewer than in any other administration in history -- and far fewer than were listed during the administrations of Reagan (253), Clinton (521) or Bush I (234). Furthermore, during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit organization. ...

One change would significantly limit the number of species eligible for endangered status. Currently, if a species is likely to become extinct in "the foreseeable future" -- a species-specific timeframe that can stretch up to 300 years -- it's a candidate for act protections. However, the new rules scale back that timeline to mean either 20 years or 10 generations (the agency can choose which timeline). For certain species with long life spans, such as killer whales, grizzly bears or wolves, two decades isn't even one generation. So even if they might be in danger of extinction, they would not make the endangered species list because they'd be unlikely to die out in two decades. ...

Perhaps the most significant proposed change gives state governors the opportunity and funding to take over virtually every aspect of the act from the federal government. This includes not only the right to create species-recovery plans and the power to veto the reintroduction of endangered species within state boundaries, but even the authority to determine what plants and animals get protection. For plants and animals in Western states, that's bad news: State politicians throughout the region howled in opposition to the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf into Arizona and the Northern Rockies wolf into Yellowstone National Park. ...

Additional tweaks in the law would have a major impact. For instance, the proposal would narrow the definition of a species' geographic range from the landscape it inhabited historically to the land it currently occupies. Since the main reason most plants and animals head toward extinction is due to limited habitat, the change would strongly hamper the government's ability to protect chunks of land and allow for a healthy recovery in the wild.

The proposal would also allow both ongoing and planned projects by such federal agencies as the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service to go forward, even when scientific evidence indicates that the projects may drive a species to extinction. Under the new regulations, as long as the dam or logging isn't hastening the previous rate of extinction, it's approved. "This makes recovery of species impossible," says Suckling.