BILLINGS, Montana — The Biden administration asked an appeals court on Friday to revive a Trump-era rule that stripped gray wolves of remaining Endangered Species Act protections in the United States.
If successful, the measure would lead to state oversight of predators nationwide and could potentially allow hunting to resume in the Great Lakes region after a court order halted two years ago.
Environmentalists have won a lawsuit after former President Donald Trump lifted wolf protections in his final days in office.
The brief filed Friday with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was the first explicit step taken by the Biden administration to revive the rule. The protections remain in place until the court rules.
The court filing follows years of political conflict as wolves have re-introduced themselves into parts of the western United States, sometimes attacking livestock and preying on deer, elk and other large game.
Environmental groups want this expansion to continue because wolves occupy only a portion of their historic range.
Attempts to lift or reduce protections for wolves began two decades ago during the first term of former President George W. Bush and have continued under every subsequent administration.
They once roamed much of North America, but were widely exterminated in the mid-1900s by government-sponsored trapping and poisoning campaigns. The gray wolf was granted federal protection in 1974.
Every time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declares a recovery, the agency is challenged in court. In recent years, wolves in various parts of the United States have lost and regained protection several times.
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is focused on a recovery concept that allows wolves to thrive in their native environment while respecting the people who live and work in the areas where wolves live,” agency spokeswoman Vanessa Kaufman said.
The administration sides with the livestock and hunting groups, the National Rifle Association and the Republican-led state of Utah in this case.
The Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the American Society for the Protection of Animals and other groups oppose it.
“While the wolf is in care, it does very well, and when it loses care, its recovery regresses,” said Colette Akins of the Biological Recovery Center. “We won in the district court for good reason.”
She said she was “saddened” by the way officials were trying to restore Trump administration rule.
So far, efforts to restore wolves have been limited to a few areas. Federal officials agreed last year to develop the first national recovery plan by December 2025, as part of a settlement in a separate lawsuit.
Kaufman declined to say whether the government would continue with the state plan if it wins in the 9th Circuit.
But attorneys suggested in a court filing Friday that the government is ready to back out of gray wolf recovery now that the species is no longer considered endangered.
“The purpose of the ESA (Endangered Species Act) is clear: Its purpose is to prevent extinction, not to restore species to their pre-colonization populations and ranges,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote.
Congress bypassed the courts in 2011 to strip federal protections from the northern Rocky Mountains. Since then, thousands of wolves have been killed in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Lawmakers have repeatedly called for state control in the Great Lakes region of the West. When those states briefly gained jurisdiction over wolves under Trump, hunters and trappers using hounds killed nearly twice as many wolves as planned, exceeding harvest targets in Wisconsin.
Michigan and Minnesota have previously conducted hunts, but not recently.
Wolves exist, but public hunting is not allowed in states including Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado. In Alaska, where tens of thousands of wolves live, they have never been protected.
The Biden administration last year denied a request from conservation groups to restore protections for gray wolves throughout the northern Rockies, a decision that has also been challenged.
State lawmakers in the region, which includes Yellowstone National Park and other vast wilderness areas, are eager to cull more wolf packs, but federal officials have determined that relaxing state hunting rules will not risk the predators becoming completely extinct.
The United States also has a small, struggling red wolf population in the mid-Atlantic region and a Mexican wolf population in the Southwest, both of which are protected as endangered.
