The Department of Defense is backing a provision in a defense spending bill that would block the threatened chicken-sized sage-grouse bird from going on the endangered species list for a decade.
“The Administration, the Defense Department, and the Interior Department support the provision in question and believe that it could help the Department avoid any negative readiness impacts on military facilities should the species be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act,” said Pete Giambastiani, principal deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for legislative affairs, in a statement Thursday.
Giambastiani put out the statement after a Pentagon correspondence leaked on Wednesday, showing that the Defense Department was in opposition to the rider in the National Defense Authorization Act.
The Defense Department explained to House members that it “objects to the House provision and urges its exclusion” from the major spending and defense policy legislation.
The leaked documents explained that preventing the sage-grouse from being listed as endangered “misleadingly implies that the DOD has had or may have difficulty managing for these species without degrading military testing or training.”
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, authored the sage-grouse rider. His office defended the decision to include the rider, saying it is clear that listing the bird will harm military readiness in the Western states where it is most prevalent.
The greatest impacts would occur at the U.S. Yakima Training Center in Washington state, which provides live-fire training for the U.S Army in desert-like conditions, the Army said in its sage-grouse review conducted three years ago.
Other facilities affected by endangered species protections for the bird include the Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada, the Wyoming National Guard Tooele Army Depot, and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
