Updated at 5:15 p.m. MST Jan. 30. This story has been updated to reflect new information, including the status of congressional budget negotiations and grizzly bear rules.
Last week, a coalition of environmental groups sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its apparent failure to complete protections on time for endangered wolverines. At the end of this week, FWS has a deadline to publish a final rule on protections for threatened grizzly bears.
In between, Congress appears poised to slash FWS Endangered Species Act funding as it wraps up 2026 spending bills. Although outrage over recent Department of Homeland Security agents killing U.S. citizens on Minneapolis streets nearly collapsed congressional budget negotiations this week, the Interior Department’s funding plan for FWS is already in place for 2026.
On Friday, Senate members reported they reached a deal allowing nearly all remaining spending bills to pass but held back DHS funding for two weeks of further debate. Congress had until the end of Friday to replace a continuing resolution, or CR, with a finalized fiscal 2026 budget. That CR was the stop-gap measure which ended the record-setting 43-day government shutdown in November of last year. 2026 Budgets for Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation and Homeland Security remain unfinalized Wednesday as congressional Democrats negotiate with the White House.
President Donald Trump signed the 2026 appropriations legislation covering the Interior Department, which includes the Fish and Wildlife Service, on January 23. That bill also funded the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service, so access to federal public lands likely won’t be affected if Congress fails to pass the other bills by Friday. But internal functions such as Endangered Species Act reviews may be hamstrung by new funding cuts.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2026 budget for endangered species listing activities will be 36 percent smaller than last year, according to a recent analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity. That entails an 18 percent reduction in FWS staff, including more than 500 biologists, CBD said.
“It’s clearly an all-out attack on any sort of environmental protection,” said Lizzy Pennock, an attorney with WildEarth Guardians, one of the organizations suing to advance the wolverine review. “Fish and Wildlife Service was already understaffed and underfunded in better times. Even when we commented on the grizzly proposed rule last year, we noted that FWS needed to consider the threat of an underfunded organization.”
Fish and Wildlife Service officials did not respond to requests for comment on CBD’s figures for this story.
Wolverines were listed as a threatened species in November 2023. FWS is required by law to designate critical habitat within a year of listing so federal, state and local officials can take the animal’s needs into their decision-making processes. Agencies along with some private landowners and businesses are required by the Endangered Species Act to consult with FWS when their actions might harm or affect the protected species’ wellbeing.
FWS estimates 63 wolverines inhabit Greater Yellowstone, while another 49 live in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem surrounding Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. The total population for the western United States, according to FWS, may be somewhere between 249 and 926, although the agency’s best estimate as of 2013 was 318.
Matthew Bishop, Western Environmental Law Center’s lead attorney on the case, said those small numbers make it even more important to get protections in place.“We understand where they were historically, and where they still reside, but the last big science push was around 2013,” Bishop told Mountain Journal. “If there are only 300 to 350, that means the effective population is only around 30 breeding females. So we need prioritized wolverine conservation for some areas.”
In its budget presentations to Congress last year, the Trump administration proposed cutting ESA listing services from $22 million to $7.3 million and zeroing out FWS’s science applications budget entirely. The overall FWS budget request was $1.1 billion.
The service has averaged $1.94 billion each year in spending between 2017 and 2025. Congressional appropriators reduced that to about $1.6 billion for fiscal 2026.
Meanwhile, the fate of Greater Yellowstone’s grizzly bears has a deadline approaching this week too. Last January, FWS proposed a new policy of managing grizzlies in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington as a single population instead of six separate recovery areas. It also rejected requests from Montana, Wyoming and Idaho to move oversight for the bears to state wildlife agencies. That decision was up for public review for a year, and expires this January 31.
“We haven’t heard any indication if they will meet that deadline,” Andrea Zacardi of the Center for Biological Diversity told Mountain Journal. As of Friday evening, FWS had not published new information on the status of the grizzly rule.
Republican Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman a year ago introduced a bill in the House to delist Greater Yellowstone grizzlies, with support from Montana Republican representatives Ryan Zinke and Troy Downing and Idaho Representative Russ Fulcher. The measure never made it to a floor vote in 2025.
But due to last year’s federal shutdown, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, which oversees state and federal management of grizzlies, could not convene its Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee or its Executive Committee for their regular late-2025 meetings due to the federal shutdown. The annual reports on population, mortality and habitat capacity use typically released at those sessions have yet to be published in 2026.
