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Friday, the Feds Gut the Endangered Species Act. Wisconsin Sued to Stop It Today — While Its Own DNR Plans to Do the Same Thing to Wolves

Two things happened this week that tell you everything about how wildlife protection actually works in this country: who fights for it on paper, and who abandons it the moment it’s politically convenient.

What actually takes effect Friday

On September 14, a final rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries takes effect that erases the definition of “harm” that has been on the books since 1975. For fifty years, “harm” under the ESA meant more than a bullet or a trap — it meant destroying or degrading the habitat a species needs to breed, feed, and shelter. The Supreme Court upheld that definition in 1995. The agencies just threw it out, leaning on a decades-old dissent and last year’s Loper Bright decision to justify it.

Strip out the legal language and here’s what’s left: starting Friday, bulldozing a wetland, clear-cutting a nesting ground, or draining a stream that an endangered species depends on is no longer, by itself, illegal “take” under federal law — as long as you don’t directly kill or injure the animal in the process. Oil, gas, mining, and development interests get a green light. Wildlife gets nothing.

The two things standing between this rule and permanence

First, today’s lawsuits, which argue the rollback violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act and ignores decades of precedent. That fight will play out in federal court over months, not days — it will not stop the rule from taking effect Friday.

Second, H.R. 9901, the Safeguarding Endangered Species Act, introduced by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Mike Quigley (D-IL), co-chairs of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus. It’s a one-line bill: it would strip the rescission rule of any legal force. It’s bipartisan. It’s sitting in the House Natural Resources Committee. It needs pressure to move.

Now here’s the part that should make you furious

Wisconsin’s attorney general just put his name on a lawsuit defending the idea that habitat destruction is harm to a protected species. Good. But look at what his own state’s wildlife agency is doing at the same time, and that principle evaporates.

Gray wolves have been back on the federal endangered species list since a February 2022 court ruling. Harvest is illegal. Right now, today. And yet the Wisconsin DNR’s Wolf Advisory Committee — including at its meeting this past February 26 — has been spending its time planning harvest zones, quotas, and season structures for a wolf hunt it cannot legally hold. The wolf harvest regulations the Natural Resources Board approved back in 2023 are fully drafted and took effect last November, sitting on the shelf, ready to go the instant delisting comes through. This isn’t contingency planning for some hypothetical future. It’s operational readiness to kill a federally protected species the moment Washington hands over the keys — while the state’s own attorney general argues in federal court that destroying protected habitat is illegal harm. You cannot hold both positions honestly at the same time.

It gets worse, and it’s bigger than wolves. Statement of Scope SS 049-26 (DNR Rule NH-03-26), filed by the department itself, opens the door to rewriting Wisconsin’s entire state endangered and threatened species list. No specific species are named yet — that comes later, in the actual rule. But the department’s own economic impact analysis, buried in section 8 of the scope statement, already tells you where this is headed: it states outright that the number of species records under consideration for removal from the list is expected to exceed the number under consideration for addition, and it frames that outcome as a benefit, because it will “lessen regulatory impacts to businesses and individuals.” That is the state version of the federal habitat rollback, in the department’s own words — fewer protected species means fewer environmental review headaches for developers. A public hearing is anticipated for November 2026. The contact is Owen Boyle, Species Management Section Manager, at owen.boyle@wisconsin.gov.

Layer the politics on top of that, and it gets worse still. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor, authored the Pet and Livestock Protection Act — legislation that wouldn’t just delist the gray wolf, it would exempt that delisting from judicial review entirely, so no court could ever put protections back regardless of what the science shows later. That’s not wildlife management. That’s a permanent political override of biology.

David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, holds the same position. He supports delisting wolves too. On this issue, the two candidates running to lead a state that just sued the federal government to preserve endangered species protections are in complete agreement that one specific endangered species doesn’t deserve them.

Both of them are wrong, and for the same reason. Wolf recovery benchmarks in the Great Lakes region were set decades ago as political compromises, not biological findings, and they’ve never been revisited with independent science. Wisconsin’s own DNR puts the current wolf population at roughly 1,162 animals in 321 packs — nowhere near a crisis, and well within the state’s own carrying-capacity estimates. Tiffany’s bill doesn’t just delist; Section 3 writes in a permanent bar on judicial review, so no future court could ever revisit the decision no matter what the population data shows ten years from now. Crowley’s position offers no such detail at all — no management plan, no season structure, no answer for how “delisting” translates into an actual body count. And neither one of them is even reading the room right. Seventy-nine percent of Wisconsinites support wolf protection. Sixty-one percent want the same number of wolves we have now, or more — including in wolf range. Republicans and Democrats alike support the ESA and wildlife protection. Hunters, farmers, and landowners do not uniformly support delisting. This isn’t the safe, popular position either campaign seems to think it is.

This isn’t hypothetical timing, either. President Trump signed an executive order on September 5 directing the Interior Secretary to determine within 90 days whether gray wolves meet the criteria for delisting. I spoke with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Danielle Kaeding today about exactly what that means on the ground: if delisting goes through, Wisconsin moves immediately to a wolf hunt like the one five years ago, when hunters killed 218 wolves in under three days.

“These are the folks that in 60 hours killed 200 wolves… in a very coordinated effort. This is who wolf hunters are, unfortunately.”

State law leaves no discretion here — a hunt is mandatory the moment federal protection lifts. Read the full WPR story, “Tiffany, Crowley aligned on removing federal protections for wolves in Wisconsin.”

And the “livestock crisis” driving all of this doesn’t hold up. You have about the same chance of being hit by a meteor as you do of losing a cow to a wolf — and 58,000 Wisconsin farms are proof coexistence works every single day. Wolves are not the threat this narrative needs them to be.

And this isn’t new. It was the Obama administration that first stripped wolves in Idaho and Montana of ESA protection in 2011, using a budget rider that blocked federal courts from reviewing the decision — the exact maneuver Tiffany is trying again now. The Biden Justice Department then spent years in court defending the Trump-era rule that delisted the gray wolf nationally. This has never been a clean partisan line, and Crowley standing next to Tiffany on this issue is proof it still isn’t. You cannot assume either party will protect wildlife in this state by default. Not this year. Not on this issue.

What to do this week

• Call your U.S. Representative and tell them to cosponsor H.R. 9901, the Safeguarding Endangered Species Act.
• Thank Attorney General Kaul’s office for joining the ESA lawsuits — and tell them the same standard needs to apply to wolves in Wisconsin, not just to habitat rules with no political mascot attached. Wisconsin DOJ: (608) 266-1221.
• Tell the DNR’s Wolf Advisory Committee directly that planning a harvest season for a federally protected species is not “readiness” — it’s the same disregard for the law Wisconsin just sued the federal government over.
• Watch for the November public hearing on Statement of Scope SS 049-26 and submit comment opposing any net reduction of Wisconsin’s own endangered and threatened species list — contact Owen Boyle at owen.boyle@wisconsin.gov to get on the notification list now.
• Email both campaigns directly and ask them to describe what delisting actually triggers under state law, not just whether they support it. Crowley for Wisconsin: press@crowleyforwi.com. Tiffany for Wisconsin: press@tomtiffany.com.

We’re pushing on all five fronts at once. That’s what a hundred percent volunteer organization with no paid staff and no corporate money does — we show up anyway.