Grizzly bears may be excused for hibernating through the legal alarm clock that was supposed to go off on January 31 — their federal managers needed an extension on their Endangered Species Act homework.
Gina Shultz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s acting assistant director for ecological services, listed a change of presidential administrations, staff shortages, regulatory backlog and last year’s 43-day federal shutdown as reasons for missing the January 31 deadline to make a final rule on the grizzly’s ESA status.
Grizzly bears have been protected as a threatened species by the ESA since 1975. Although their current populations in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems are about 2,000 animals and considered near or at recovery, the 2025 update noted that bears in four other recovery areas were struggling or nonexistent.
On January 30, U.S. District Judge David Nye granted Shultz’s request and set a new deadline of December 18, 2026 “to submit to the office of the Federal Register a final rule complying with the ESA and its implementing regulations that revises or removes the entire ESA listing of grizzly bears in the lower-48 United States.”
FWS officials during the Biden administration issued a new grizzly bear proposed final rule on January 15, 2025, a week before President Donald Trump took office for a second term. Grizzly bears would retain their “threatened” status under the Biden rule. The rule also created a single population and recovery area encompassing much of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, replacing the previous rule’s jurisdiction for the entire Lower 48. And it rejected requests from Montana, Idaho and Wyoming wildlife agencies to delist the bears and replace federal oversight with state-level management.
The 2026 proposed rule received more than 200,000 public comments during its 60-day review period, Shultz said. Those administrative challenges, along with “the highly complex nature of grizzly bear rulemaking,” prompted FWS to request the deadline extension.
“[FWS] would have to state new reasoning why grizzlies should be delisted, even though last year they said the opposite.”
Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation director, Center for Biological Diversity
The issue has been yo-yoing back and forth for decades. Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzlies reached their target population of 500 animals in 2003, prompting FWS to propose delisting that specific recovery area in 2007. A federal judge rejected the move after opponents argued the agency hadn’t accounted for major losses of cutthroat trout and whitebark pine nuts that grizzlies depend on in the Yellowstone food chain. The service returned with an updated delisting plan for Greater Yellowstone in 2017, but lost again in court in part due to concerns about how delisting one recovery area might affect bear survival in other areas.
The Biden administration rule found the states’ request for local control “not warranted” in part because of a lack of regulatory controls that would prevent grizzly numbers from crashing through excessive hunting or other killings. State officials objected loudly, with Montana Governor Greg Gianforte accusing Biden of embracing “a scorched earth policy on his way out the door,” and Senator Steve Daines accusing FWS of “continuing to move the goalposts on recovery.” Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman tried several times to delist grizzlies through congressional action, and her latest attempt was thwarted in 2025’s year-end budget negotiations.
In December, FWS Director Brian Nesvik told the Cowboy State Daily that it could take another two years to reach a final conclusion on grizzly delisting. Nesvik was previously Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department director, retiring in 2024.
However, a draft replacement for the Biden rule could show up sooner. The federal rulemaking process does not allow for amendments after publication in the Federal Register; they must be replaced by new versions with their own public review process.
“My guess is we’ll see a proposed delisting rule sometime in the next few months,” said Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which has long been involved in grizzly ESA debates. “[FWS] would have to state new reasoning why grizzlies should be delisted, even though last year they said the opposite. The science doesn’t support that, and we would be challenging it in court.” FWS’s media office did not return a Mountain Journal request for comment on the rule’s deadline extension.
