A federal appellate court panel dug deeply and at times skeptically Tuesday into the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision scaling back Endangered Species Act protections for the American burying beetle.
In an unusually protracted oral argument, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit repeatedly pressed a Justice Department lawyer over the 2019 downlisting of the beetle from endangered to threatened.
The two-hour oral argument surpassed the scheduled 30 minutes, with judges sounding dubious at times about the FWS’s conclusion that the beetle is not at imminent risk of extinction despite showing low resiliency in some populations.
“It seems, from my reading of the record, that the agency is equating endangered or in danger of extinction with zero resiliency, because that’s what we will have [in the future], but there’s still low resiliency in the current range, and there’s really no explanation as to why low resiliency isn’t also in danger of extinction,” Judge Florence Pan said, adding that “there’s no explanation as to why that type of low resiliency doesn’t qualify as in danger of extinction.”
