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For far too long, federal bureaucrats who have never set foot on Wyoming lands have controlled decisions about our wildlife. That era is finally ending, thanks to the Trump administration. Last week, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced a new rule giving Wyoming and our neighboring states the flexibility to manage grizzly bear populations that have thrived in recent decades.
The Greater Yellowstone grizzly bear population tells one of America’s greatest conservation success stories. When these bears were listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1975, we had roughly 136 bears in the ecosystem. Today, that population has grown to an estimated 1,000 bears — more than a seven-fold increase that far exceeds every recovery target ever established. The science is unambiguous: this population is not only recovered but thriving and expanding beyond the boundaries of the Yellowstone region. Yet the grizzly bear remains listed. This defies logic, science, and frankly, the very purpose of the ESA.
Grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have cleared federal recovery benchmarks since 2004. For two decades, Wyoming has spent tens of millions of dollars building the biologists, conflict response teams, and monitoring programs behind this recovery. Wyoming people know these bears and have earned the right to manage them. Wyoming’s Bear Wise program has spent years teaching ranchers and recreationists how to live alongside a growing grizzly population, and it works. Wyoming Game and Fish biologists relocate dozens of bears every year to resolve conflicts before they escalate, including one moved out of Sublette County this summer after a cattle conflict.
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The grizzly was briefly delisted in 2007, only to be relisted by the Obama administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service in 2009 after activist litigation. The pattern repeated itself under Biden. When the state petitioned again for delisting, the Biden administration slow-walked the review for years and ultimately rejected it in 2023, again citing the same activist lawsuits and manufactured uncertainty rather than the recovery data Biden’s own agency had collected.
The Biden administration’s final word came on January 8, 2025, just twelve days before he left office. With one foot out the door, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected Wyoming’s and Montana’s delisting petitions yet again, leaning on the same tired excuses as always. In their place, they offered an almost laughable substitute: letting landowners kill a bear without a permit, but only once livestock were already in imminent danger. Ranchers could act only after the damage was already being done. It was bureaucratic sleight of hand dressed up as compromise, and nobody in Wyoming was fooled. After sixteen years of activist litigation and manufactured uncertainty, this was Biden’s final parting shot at a region he had spent years
working against, one last slap at the people who had asked Washington, again and again, simply to be trusted with their own land and wildlife.
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Biden’s bureaucrats knew the population had recovered. They knew the law required returning management to the states. Instead, they hid behind litigation and let special left-leaning interests dictate wildlife policy for a species they will only ever encounter in a nature documentary.
The ESA was written to recover imperiled species and then return their management to the states once recovery is achieved. When we refuse to delist recovered species, we send a dangerous message: that the ESA is not really about conservation at all, but about permanent federal control.
Wyoming’s ranchers, hunters, and wildlife managers live with grizzly bears every day. We understand the balance between conservation and coexistence better than anyone behind a desk in Washington, and that experience is exactly why our folks in Wyoming should be making these management calls.
That is why, every Congress, Senator Barrasso, Rep. Hageman, my Senate Western Caucus colleagues, and I introduce legislation to delist the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population of the grizzly bear. Keeping them listed indefinitely does not help the species; it hurts it and undermines good-faith conservation efforts by eroding public trust in the ESA. When the law loses credibility by refusing to acknowledge its own successes, it becomes harder to build support for protecting species that truly are endangered. It is time to delist the grizzly in our area and let science, not politics, dictate our wildlife policy.
This proposed rule by the Trump administration is a good first step, and I will keep working with Secretary Burgum and my colleagues to see it through to full delisting. Wyoming has earned the right to manage what we helped recover. The science has said so for years. Now, finally, we have a federal government willing to admit it.
President Trump promised to return power to the states. Once again, he is keeping his promises.
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