Environmentalists sued Wednesday to force the Interior Department to protect two dozen endangered species, the first major lawsuit against the agency since David Bernhardt took over as head less than a week ago.
The lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity argues that Bernhardt’s agency has slow-walked the listing of 24 species as endangered or threatened after proposing to do so, saying the Trump administration has listed the lowest number of species since Ronald Reagan was president.
The citizen lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to order the agency’s Fish and Wildlife Service to issue final determinations for the two dozen species, along with special orders that define critical habitat for the animals, which would make areas of the country off-limits to development.
“The Service’s failure to make these listing decisions and critical habitat designations is delaying the [Endangered Species Act’s] substantive legal protections for these endangered and threatened species, thereby allowing these species to continue to decline, heightening the risk of their extinction, and ultimately making their recovery costlier and more difficult,” the lawsuit reads.
The suit alleges that the delay on these 24 proposed listings has created a decision backlog for over 500 species in the queue waiting to be listed.
The center was the first group to sue the Trump administration over its proposed border wall because of the harm it would cause to the habitat of numerous threatened species. The group says it has sued the Trump administration 121 times as of Wednesday.
Bernhardt has made reforming the Endangered Species Act listing process and critical habitat rules his primary focus at the agency. His goal is to change the regulations in order to allow for drilling, mining and other industry activities, rather than imposing limits based on a protected animals’ habitat requirements.
Bernhardt is also under investigation by the agency’s inspector general on whether his actions at the agency benefited clients he once lobbied for when he was appointed deputy interior secretary.
Bernhardt was also sued on Tuesday by the Western Values Project, a public lands advocacy group, in California’s Superior Court for failure to fulfill three public records requests related to his previous occupation as a lobbyist and industry consultant.
Specifically, the group wants correspondence that Bernhardt had with his former client Westlands Water District. The Western Values Project believes the water district benefited materially from Bernhardt’s work as a lobbyist and later as a federal official.