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Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. I'm your host, Nate Swick.

Thank you once again for joining me.

We talked Migratory Bird Treaty Act recently and thankfully the court stepped in and stopped those proposed changes.

We talked about that a couple months ago.

But here we are, once again in 2020, tasked with protecting landmark environmental policy.

This time it is the Endangered Species Act, another piece of legislation that,

while not as old as the MBTA, as once again, as endangered as the species it purports to protect.

The threat does not come from the executive branch this time, but from the legislative branch,

specifically Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who has introduced a bill to amend the ESA,

ostensibly to increase transparency, but as with all of these things, the devil is

in the details.

And without going too much into those devilish details, this bill essentially does three things.

The first thing it does is it elevates the roles of states in decision making, but does

so in a way that is an unfunded mandate. So basically increasing

the responsibility on individual states, individual state lawmakers to protect endangered species

...