The Government Grift

Wildlife Pays the Price

In “Gag-Ordered No More: The 800-Pound Gorilla in the U.S. Government,” Brian Czech,

the first conservation biologist in the history of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), writes about a 20-year fight at the government organization to build awareness of conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation for current and future generations.

Czech didn’t fare well in the fight.

Czech’s ideas, initially welcomed in the National Wildlife Refuge System of USFWS, eventually were deemed unacceptable through successive leadership in USFWS. Ultimately, he was told he was not allowed to talk about the linkage between economic impact and the negative impact on conservation — gagged.

In his book, Czech attributes the suppression of the obvious truth — we can’t have unlimited growth and vigorous wildlife conservation — to several factors, including agency corruption. While it was not corruption of direct theft of funds, it was something more banal. For example, Czeck writes there was a deeply rooted culture of travel, only interrupted by COVID, but a culture that the writer, no longer with the agency, assumes continues.

Czech outlines much travel and entertainment in the U.S. and to other countries, which he describes as mostly unnecessary, including an $800,000 Las Vegas party in 2010 under the auspices of the General Services Administration. Many of the trips were essentially “paid vacations,” as one staffer described them to Czech. The senior management of USFWS had developed a culture of travel wherein this was a “perk” of the job, at taxpayer expense, of course.

With the amount of fraud and “lawfare” in the U.S. government today, maybe tens of millions of dollars spent on unnecessary travel over years doesn’t resonate as that big of a problem with today’s citizens. Perhaps even overpaying for land in the National Refuge System won’t trouble voters. But this sort of abuse does all add up and lower employee morale at any organization over time — the “Honest Joes” know they and their fellow citizens are being cheated.

As well, Czech tells his readers, one might think those employed by USFWS were conservationists and environmentalists. Alas, many “fooled themselves into thinking that, because they were working for the Refuge System, they were conservationists,” writes Czech.

But what seemed to pervade the USFWS most, from my reading of Czech’s book, was what infects too many organizations, be they government, corporate or nonprofit, a “group think,” a bullying of anyone not “towing the line” and too many people in key positions without the requisite skills and knowledge, including leadership abilities. Any organization is defined by its leadership. At the end of Czech’s book, he describes what skills and attributes the head of the USFWS should possess to be in line with the mission of the agency. So the next President of the United States and the U.S. Senate do have a good roadmap for the USFWS created by Czech.

“Our only chance to prevail for wildlife conservation in the long run was to stabilize the size of the human economy,” Czech reiterated to team members more than half-way through his USFWS career. “While we obviously couldn’t formulate the nation’s economic policies, we just as obviously had the unique obligation to raise public awareness of the trade-off between economic growth and wildlife conservation.”

In a GDP-driven world, it’s easy to see why discussing that 800-pound gorilla would not fly.

Certainly the USFWS is not the only government organization with problems. Collectively, U.S. government agencies and departments are humongous. The U.S. federal government has 1.4 million employees, 365 agencies and a payroll of $112.6 billion. The sheer size of government lends itself to ample room for mismanagement and fraud.

One of the worst offenders, from the standpoint of misguided wildlife policies, is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Wildlife Services,” a misnomer if there ever was one. In 2022, according to the environmental organization WildEarth Guardians, Wildlife Services slaughtered more than 384,300 native animals in the U.S., including 219 gray wolves, 7 federally protected grizzly bears, 205 mountain lions and 26,371 beavers. More than 2,600 animals were killed “unintentionally” in 2022.

WildEarth Guardians reports that Wildlife Services “routinely poisons, gasses, traps, strangles, crushes and shoots wildlife across the country,” often at the behest of private industries. Your tax dollars at work killing the country’s wildlife, sentient beings. In the prior year, the killing operation killed 400,000 animals.

Read more about these taxpayer-funded animal murders here, here and here.

And of course there is the beagle research and disallowed gain-of-function research of Dr. Fauci, aka the second coming of Dr. Mengele, the former director of the federal agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Too, there is the EPA’s backpedaling on ending animal testing by 2035 and killing bunnies, as reported by the White Coat Waste Project.

A most egregious example of no one minding the government henhouse was recently reported in Stars and Stripes. An Army employee, Janet Yamanaka Mello, has been charged with stealing $100 million from a fund for military children. Not $1 million, not $10 million, but $100 million! The fraud was perpetrated against the 4-H Military Partnership Grant program. The grant program helps military children participate in projects with 4-H, which is a traditionally farming-focused network of youth organizations administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a federal organization. It seems unbelievable that a $100 million defalcation was missed by USDA, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Defense and other government entities!

While Czech may have been thwarted by USFWS chiefs who failed to embrace his science-based ideas, he has succeeded elsewhere. Czech’s environmental work carries on via the nonprofit organization, CASSE, that he started while still at the government agency. The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy addresses the “800-pound gorilla,” the basic conflict between ongoing growth and environmental protection, and what Czech has concluded is the solution: a steady state economy with stabilized population and consumption.

To date, more than 15,000 have signed onto this position, including the renowned primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall and famed scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki. Find the position on the CASSE website for signature, offered in 29 languages.

Maria Fotopoulos writes about the connection between overpopulation and biodiversity loss, and from time to time other topics that confound her. On FB @BetheChangeforAnimals and givesendgo.com/calliescathouse.