MISSOULA — Some federal decisions related to grizzly bears are imminent, but so too are budget cutbacks and leadership changes that could affect grizzly management.
During a Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee meeting in Bozeman this week, Claudia Regan, US Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center director, praised recent work by the Grizzly Bear Study Team but said much of the grizzly bear research would likely stop due to a reduced USGS budget.
“An underlying principle for us is that we will prioritize meeting the minimum requirements for population monitoring as specified in the conservation strategy. In doing that, we’ll have to wipe out a lot of other work that we’ve done and services that we’ve provided,” Regan said.
This isn’t the first year the USGS has faced budget cuts. Last year, Regan gavea similar warning, explaining that through the past few decades, the USGS has led the grizzly bear study team doing both research and monitoring using a budget that was about 75% USGS appropriated money and 25% money that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reimbursed.
However, over the past few years, the Fish and Wildlife Service had to reduce the amount it could reimburse, because House Republicans targeted the Fish and Wildlife Service for deep funding cuts, partly to diminish the Endangered Species Act. In November 2023, House Republicans passed a bill intended to slash the agency’s endangered species program in fiscal year 2024 by nearly $26 million below 2023 levels. And those levels were lower than previous years due to continuing cuts.
Regan and her staff knew what was coming and started streamlining what work they could in 2020. In the meantime, other agencies were able to provide funding and in-kind work to sustain the grizzly monitoring program. The USGS provided extra money to cover grizzly research in fiscal year 2023 and some in FY2024, but that’s gone. Repeated cuts are taking their toll, and other agencies are also facing reduced budgets under the new Congress and a Trump administration.
“We’re really at the point now where those options are no longer going to help us. I do expect some pretty substantive changes in FY2025, based upon best-case budget scenarios,” Regan said.
Regan said it was likely that staff hiring would be limited and seasonal hiring might end, which would limit the field work. Without enough personnel, scientists might not be able to collar enough grizzlies each year to directly monitor a minimum of 25 bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
“If we can’t meet that minimum number, then we will curtail operations because there’s no point in collaring bears if we can’t meet the number required to make the confirmation estimates. We will possibly reduce or eliminate all telemetry monitoring, depending upon manning,” Regan said. “I want to make sure that everybody is aware that we can’t keep doing all the work we’ve been doing for 50 years under these budget constraints.”
Later in the meeting, Frank Van Manen, USGS Grizzly Bear Study Team lead, summarized all the basic demographic monitoring his team does, from population estimates to occupied habitat calculations. After highlighting some recently published research, he asked the committee members if there was any research they’d like to see but clarified that “it would be entirely contingent on other resources.”
Representatives of the U.S. Forest Service asked for information on whether wildfires — in addition to development and forest management activities — are affecting grizzly connectivity.
Region 2 deputy regional forester Andrea Delgado mentioned that the Pack Trail and Clearwater fires had burned huge areas of forest in Wyoming over the course of two months.
Region 4 deputy forester Christopher Campbell said his region also had a significant fire season with several hundred thousand acres affected across multiple forests, much of it in Idaho.
Van Manen said he wasn’t aware of any studies looking at that. He suggested that a low-cost way to assess that would be adding a fire-risk GIS layer to the map of likely grizzly migration routes developed by Sarah Sells.
As agency representatives gave reports on their grizzly recovery efforts, the turnover in leadership was evident, and there’s always a concern that so many new faces can slow committee progress. IGBC chair Jim Federicks said the timing of the meeting made things even tougher, due to the pending decision on state-initiated grizzly bear delisting petitions.
“There’s a lot that’s going to happen in the next month, and we’ll be able to have more meaningful discussions when we have a better sense of what the decisions coming out of the Fish and Wildlife Service are going to be,” Fredericks said. “We did contemplate pushing this meeting back until the new year, but given that a lot of what we have on the agenda are updates from the subcommittees, I think there’s still value in being here.”
The updates included a litany of all the people leaving their jobs. On Tuesday, the Lolo National Forest formally announced the retirement of Forest Supervisor Carolyn Upton, but she joins a long line of supervisors who’ve moved on.
Region 1 deputy forester Ben South said four national forests in his region — the Flathead, Custer-Gallatin, Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Nez Perce-Clearwater — have been assigned new supervisors in the past year, and now he’ll have to replace Upton.
Delgado said the entire Region 2 regional forester team, including herself, is new this year. Delgado came over from the Department of Agriculture. Over in Washington state and Region 6, Jackie Buchanan took over as regional forester this year, and the Okanogan-Wenatchee Forest east of North Cascades National Park has a new supervisor.
At Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Region 1 supervisor Lee Anderson, who has been the chair of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem subcommittee, announced he is retiring in 10 days.
Region 3 in Bozeman has hired biologist Kelly Proffitt as its new supervisor after Marina Yoshioka moved up to acting director a month ago. Last week, Governor Greg Gianforte announced Department of Agriculture director Christy Clark would be the new FWP director.
The new leaders will have new issues to deal with but fewer resources to call on after the Fish and Wildlife Service decisions are announced on Jan. 20.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.
