Records Reveal Yet Another Instance of Special Interest Groups Driving Biden Admin Agenda

Activists sought to set up a meeting with political appointees and exclude career government experts to advance “climate consultations” under the Endangered Species Act.

Government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) announced the disclosure of records revealing once again the immense influence special interests exerted on policy during the Biden administration.

These documents show how two non-governmental special interest groups – the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Harvard Animal Law Clinic – petitioned political appointees at the Department of the Interior (DOI) to make the progressive climate change agenda a larger part of its regulations, specifically the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

An email sent to DOI employees by CBD Government Affairs Director Brett Hartl in July 2021 expressed the NGO’s desire to foster “more climate-friendly decisions,” pushing climate consultations as “an important safeguard against any attempted rollbacks by a future administration that is hostile to environmental protections.”

As the documents show, the two NGOs pushed for the department to incorporate how climate change impacts “every threatened and endangered species in the United States and its territories” into the ESA and similar regulations, so that it may be better addressed by the federal government. The groups expressed a desire to have previous presidential administrations’ limitations on climate consultations for the federal government “unilaterally reversed,” including “a policy enacted during the Bush administration.”

Similarly, the groups had the goal of requesting “on behalf of scientists and environmental scholars to revoke certain policies” that “restrict agencies from taking into account greenhouse gases when administering the Endangered Species Act.”

Members of the NGOs named regulations added to the ESA by the Trump administration in 2019 that supposedly hampered the government’s ability to protect wildlife from climate change. The groups claimed these regulations “may be construed and implemented by agencies in a manner that undermines their ability to meaningfully evaluate climate-change related injuries that federal agencies must consider during consultation.”

It’s also worth noting that the NGOs requested meetings with only Biden political appointees at DOI, stating, “Frankly, we do not have confidence that upper-level management within the career staff at the Fish and Wildlife Service believe that the Endangered Species Act can be useful in the fight against climate change.” Though there’s no evidence this was ever agreed to, it hints at the more political rather than scientific nature of the NGOs’ requests.

The 2019 Trump administration regulations revised the ESA’s implementing rules in two respects that effectively curbed FWS’s consideration of climate change in its decision-making. First, at 50 C.F.R. § 424.11(d), FWS was required to determine that both future threats and the species’ responses to those threats were “likely” – constraining the agency to near-term, demonstrable threat trajectories rather than the long-range probabilistic projections that climate science typically produces. Second, at 50 C.F.R. § 424.12(b)(2), FWS was required to make a threshold finding of “reasonable certainty” before designating unoccupied areas as critical habitat – limiting the agency’s ability to protect areas into which species would need to migrate as climate conditions shifted their range.

The Biden administration’s 2024 revisions removed both constraints, giving FWS a freer hand to consider consequences: (1) far in the future, by replacing the “likely” standard with “reasonably reliable predictions”; (2) far from a species’ current range, by relaxing the certainty threshold for unoccupied critical habitat; and (3) involving multi-step causal chains, such as those linking greenhouse gas emissions to shifting habitat conditions to species viability, that are probabilistic in nature and had not previously satisfied the “likely” standard as applied to both the threat and the species’ response simultaneously.

These revelations provide additional evidence that political appointees during the Biden administration engaged in unseemly relationships with these outside special interest groups and how they influenced policy within the Biden administration.

“The more that we at PPT uncover about special interests’ influence in our federal government, the less we are surprised by what we find,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain. “We know that the Biden administration outsourced its climate policy to consulting firms and special interest groups. These new emails further confirm their reliance on these groups for climate policy, policy that seemed driven more by a political agenda rather than science.”

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