The Trump Administration and the governors of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming have announced a plan to all but delist grizzly bears without having to provide the legally required analysis required, one that is  based on scientific rigor, independent peer review and full public participation.

First, under the guise of “common sense,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on July 10 that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (and its sister agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service) would unilaterally rescind the meaning of “harm” under section 4(d) of the ESA, removing habitat protections for grizzly bears that have been enshrined in the enabling regulations of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for more than five decades. If this comes to pass, as it is set to on Sept. 14, 2026, grizzly bears will lose critical regulatory protections that have provided the habitat security essential for the population growth and expansion since they were listed in 1975.

Four days later, Secretary Burgum initiated a new rulemaking process that will hand over day-to-day management of grizzly bears to the states, even as they ostensibly remain federally protected by the ESA.

“This decision would remove a federal backstop that’s kept grizzly bear recovery on track for 50 years and it does so at exactly the moment that the species is facing escalating threats,” Jenny Harbine, managing attorney for the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice’s Northern Rockies office, told the Flathead Beacon. “There’s the ongoing threats from an administration that is fast-tracking logging and mining, weakening environmental review, and moving to rescind the Roadless Rule, which opens up some of the most critical habitat corridors to new threats. Any attempt to weaken grizzly bear protections in this context is reckless.”

Many of these growing threats to grizzly bears are largely due to recent federal regulatory changes that will compromise grizzly bear habitat security and increase grizzly bear mortalities in Montana.

“We see merits in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposed approach here—effectively a phased delisting rather than a hard on-off approach—but the Service hasn’t done its due diligence to assess whether these changes will improve or imperil the long-term future of this iconic species,” said Peter Metcalf, executive director of the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance. “The proposal is so vague on details and permissive of mortality, that there is a real risk that grizzly bear mortality increases to the point that the success we’ve had with grizzly bear recovery will be reversed.”

While Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks employees already do much of the day-to-day management of grizzly bears, they have done so within a transparent, legal framework that guides their operations and protects grizzly bear habitat. Now, management will rely on unspecified “management plans,” “conservation strategies,” and “memorandums of understanding” between the states and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the details of which have not been made clear, nor whether the public will have an opportunity to review and comment. 

“We’re concerned that the proposed approach will lead to more mortality and habitat degradation,” Metcalf added, “especially in response to perceived threats to livestock and outside recovery areas where bears are recovering and there is less social tolerance. The public needs to know all the details so we can be able to comment before this monumental decision can move forward.”

In the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem where we work, the proposed rescission of the Roadless Rule, and possibly the Travel Management Plan, could put the Badger-Two Medicine and other Forest Service lands that provide habitat security for grizzly bears in jeopardy. Several recent forest management projects on the Flathead National Forest, including the Granite-Moccasin logging project and the Emergency Blowdown Salvage logging project, propose new road building within core habitat, eroding the secure habitat grizzly bears need to survive. The Administration has also directed the expansion of public lands grazing, which would put more bears at risk of conflicts with livestock.

While Montana has a relatively robust Statewide Grizzly Bear Management Plan compared to Idaho and Wyoming, it doesn’t include any commitment to managing toward natural connectivity, including protections for bears or habitat in critical corridors between the NCDE and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, or with the small populations in northwest Montana and northern Idaho, leaving them on isolated islands of habitat vulnerable to extinction.

The last time FWP took over management of a threatened carnivore, they botched the job. FWP chose to use a method of estimating Montana’s wolf population that was known to be deficient, and this led to an overestimate of the wolf population by at least a third, all the while increasing hunting and trapping quotas year after year. FWP’s 2025 wolf report concluded that if average harvest rates had continued, the statewide population could have fallen below the 450-wolf minimum threshold set by the Montana Wolf Management Plan within the next three years.

And while we have great respect for the FWP’s bear management team and the heroic work they do to help people and bears share the landscape, we have real concerns that the politicization of bear management by the state legislature and other elected officials will lead to similarly aggressive killing, relocations, or unreliable population estimates, similar to what has occurred with wolf management. Unlike wolves, bears cannot biologically absorb the same mistakes.

The proposed new Rule also comes at a time when funding for proven, non-lethal conflict prevention programs and livestock loss compensation funds appear in jeopardy, raising concerns about the ability of managers and nonprofits to continue to reduce conflicts or help people adjust to living with bears, in some places for the first time in generations. 

“We want to see the state be successful, but this proposed Rule essentially says trust us rather than how they will do it,” Metcalf said. “We need a more transparent, science-based process that complies with the intent and the core requirements of the ESA. The grizzly bear and the public deserve at least that much.”

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