What cost to recover them all?

About 35 species are no longer endangered and have either been removed from the endangered species list or proposed to be removed in the next 2 years.  These include well-known species like the bald eagle and American alligator and obscure ones including Hoover’s woolly star and Eggert’s sunflower.  

What would it cost to recover the rest?

Every year since 1989, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has published a report on how much it and all other state and federal agencies spend on each species.  This data makes it possible to look at the cost of these recoveries.  After adjusting for inflation and putting all costs into 2013 dollars, the FWS spent an average of $774,000 per year recovering each species.  Expenditures by all government agencies equaled $1.6 million per year.

Assume recovery of the 1,400 species still on the endangered species list was similar.   Doing so gives an estimated $2.2 billion per year cost to recover all species.  That’s a big number!

However, a big part of the average is driven by past spending on bald eagles of more than $17 million per year.  Taking bald eagles out of the average lowers total government spending per recovery to $862,000 or $1.2 billion per year for all recoveries.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service receives about $185 million to implement the Endangered Species Act – about $82 million of which is spent on recovery.   Yet the most recent expenditure report to Congress shows that all agencies spent $1.4 billion in 2012 and another $300 million to buy land for endangered species.  In other words, about what is needed to recover all species.  

So why aren’t we getting more recoveries?  If recoveries are an important public goal, it is because too much money is being spent on some species and not enough on others.  One billion of that existing funding is spent on just 50 species.  The other big reason is because much of this money is spent trying to lessen the impact of harmful actions rather than on efforts that actually move the species in the right direction.  In other words, we spend a lot of money just trying to keep things from getting worse.  This funding for ‘extinction prevention’ is often just as important as dollars directed to recovery.

So let’s say $1-$2 billion is the range of what is needed to recover all species.  Compare that to other expenses, USDA is authorized to spend about $6 billion per year, mostly on soil and water conservation projects with farmers (or $294 billion over the last 75 years).  Just the amount of the cost overrun on a new U.S. Navy aircraft carrier is $2.5 billion.  Americans spend $2 billion per year on chewing gum.  The National Park Service budget is about $2.6 billion.

If we were going to increase funding to recover endangered species it doesn’t have to come through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service endangered species program.  It could be allocated through USDA’s programs to help farmers and ranchers restore habitat – and could pay them for any loss of revenue they experience from growing wildlife instead of food.  Or it could be allocated to grant programs and cost-share efforts like the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program that Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe champions.  The Land and Water Conservation Fund is another good program through which Congress could provide some of the money needed to be able to recover hundreds more endangered species.

So $1-$2 billion per year to get every endangered species off the endangered list – less than we spend on bubble gum – much of which is already being put on the table but not necessarily used in ways to maximize the number of species being restored.