The Myth of Wildlife Management
by George Reiger (Field and Stream)

Follow the money; you won't like where it goes.

In this two-part article, I'll describe first how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is no longer meeting its wildlife management obligations to sportsmen under the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson (P-R and D-J, a.k.a. Wallop-Breaux) acts; and second how, in particular, the USFWS has failed to live up to its responsibilities under our migratory bird treaties with Canada and Mexico.

In 1937, at the urging of sportsmen, an excise tax on hunting equipment‹and in 1950, on angling equipment‹was created to raise money for the restoration of fish and game. The combined total now exceeds $400 million annually. These monies are collected by the Internal Revenue Service and are supposed to be invested by the USFWS prior to their distribution to state fish and game agencies based on a formula involving a state's size, water area, and the number of hunting and fishing licenses it sold the previous year. In order to receive its share of the fund, each state is pledged to use the money exclusively for the restoration and management of fish and wildlife.

In the beginning, P-R money was sorely needed to restore such scarce game species as the pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, and wild turkey. When D-J funds came along, they were used to build hatcheries and stock lakes, rivers, and streams, thereby providing new or renewed opportunities for millions of anglers.

The Rot Sets In
By the 1980s, P-R and D-J money was still needed for game and fisheries management but the phrase ecosystem management had crept into the environmental lexicon, making genuine (i.e., single-species) management politically incorrect. In addition, the USFWS was beginning to suffer from a variety of administrative ills.

For example, prior to the 1980s, every USFWS employee responsible for the disbursement of P-R and D-J funds had worked three or more years for a state conservation agency. They were all biologists, proud of the fund, and determined to see that it remain dedicated to fish and game management. Their familiarity with state policies and procedures also made them savvy about almost every trick that politicians used to try to divert the money to other purposes.

Then several things happened to corrupt the system. First, the USFWS began replacing older biologists with less well trained and‹in some cases‹clearly unqualified personnel, some of whom seemed to believe that hunting was an outmoded facet of American life. Inevitably, morale among traditional wildlife managers took a nosedive from which it still hasn't recovered.

As experienced oversight workers were replaced by people who didn't care about‹or were even downright hostile to‹hunting, state and federal conservation administrators found that they could use, with increasing impunity, P-R funds for purposes other than game management. A few years ago, the General Accounting Office found that the USFWS had diverted between $40 million and $50 million of these earmarked monies to other agencies with little or no stake in wildlife management. Most scandalous of all, the people in charge had paid themselves substantial "bonuses" for doing so. But because accountability is increasingly rare in public service, no one was punished.

Audit? What Audit?
The second trend to jeopardize genuine oversight was the government's decision in 1984 to use a single accounting team every five years to audit all matching-grant monies going to the states. A handful of harried accountants must now check the disbursement to every state of all federal dollars‹ranging from highway, welfare, and sewer grants to the P-R/D-J fund.

The $400 million provided by sportsmen is small potatoes alongside the billions coming from general revenues. Furthermore, the average auditor‹who wouldn't know a pheasant from a flycatcher‹has sometimes decided that paving a new road into a state park where hunting is prohibited or even building a prison in a wildlife management area (and then, of course, closing the land to hunting) is a legitimate use of P-R funds. (Yes, both actually happened.)

By the mid-1990s, the situation was so bad the USFWS was forced to hire the Defense Contracting Audit Agency (DCAA) to try to restore law and order to the system. By the summer of 2001, DCAA had audited P-R/D-J disbursements in all but two states and the territory of Guam. It found that some $125 million had been misappropriated.

One state used P-R money to buy parkland where it prohibited hunting. Another spent its share of the fund on SWAT teams and other forms of law enforcement unrelated to fish and wildlife management. When the states were told they had to repay the misspent money, they got the USFWS to fire DCAA.

Brace Yourself for Pork Power
Why is there a conspiracy of silence in the conservation community about these events?

Jim Beers, a 30-year veteran of the USFWS, who worked for eight years as a P-R/D-J fund administrator, believes the answer lies in the proposed Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA), which nearly made it through Congress last year and has an even better chance this year.

In a nutshell, CARA will provide $3 billion annually for 15 years to state resource agencies. The states are understandably thrilled. So is the USFWS, which will get to administer the money‹"just like it already does the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson fund," say the bill's supporters. And with so much money flowing to the states for nongame purposes, antihunters know they'll soon control those last few conservation agencies not yet dominated by preservationist policies.

But if the USFWS and its state counterparts can't legitimately manage $400 million a year, what hope is there that they will act with any greater integrity once they get their hands on $3 billion a year? CARA is clearly one pork-pie the Congress must not be allowed to bake.

Next month: The duck debacle.