Congress should codify the National Listing Workplan

In the 15 years after the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed in 1973, it was repeatedly amended. Congress passed major amendments that updated the law in 1978, 1982, and 1988. Those amendments were made largely because legislators learned how to better protect and recover species and wanted to reflect that new information in statute.

However, the ESA hasn’t been reauthorized in the last 37 years. This isn’t because society learned everything that there is to know about species conservation in 1988, but rather because many people have conflated the idea of protecting species with the idea of leaving the ESA untouched.

To better recover and protect species, it is imperative that the ESA be modified to reflect the information we’ve learned in the last 37 years, as Congress tried to do in 1978, 1982, and 1988.

Rep. Bruce Westerman’s (R-AR) bill, the ESA Amendments Act of 2025, does just that. Many of the provisions in this bill are common sense and should be supported by both sides of the aisle. For example, if passed, the bill would amend the ESA to require the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to use something called the National Listing Workplan.

Currently, the Workplan is an internal tool FWS uses to prioritize candidate and petitioned species and provide predictability about the timing of listing determinations over a five-year timeline.

The Workplan was born out of a settlement agreement in 2011 between FWS and a group called WildEarth Guardians. The agreement was in response to a practice that the Guardians, and other environmental groups, were using where they took advantage of a 1982 amendment that required the FWS to respond to public petitions to list species within one year.

They would do this by flooding FWS with hundreds of petitions at a time, making it impossible for the agency to respond to each petition within one year. Then, they would sue FWS for not responding in time. In effect, this sue and settle strategy allows outside parties to dictate the agency’s ESA agenda.

Eventually, in 2011, FWS and the Guardians entered into an agreement to stop this abuse. The agreement was as follows: WildEarth Guardians consented to refrain from suing over missed listing deadlines over the following six years in exchange for the expedited listing decisions of over 750 species. Guardians were also limited to sending 10 petitions per year during that time.

While that agreement expired in 2017, FWS continues to use the Workplan as a tool to prioritize candidate and petitioned species. However, the agency is still subject to the one-year deadline, because it still exists in the statute.

Today, FWS still faces litigation when they exceed the one-year deadline because this timeline is still required in statute. However, many courts have been willing to give them more time to respond to a petition when they can justify their timeline with reference to the Workplan. Although, there is nothing stopping a group from engaging in the same sue and settle scheme at any time.

Rep. Westerman’s ESA Amendments Act of 2025 would prevent this from happening again by repealing the one-year deadline. In its place, the bill would require FWS to use the five-year Workplan.

By setting aside the one-year deadline and incorporating the National Listing Workplan into the statute, Americans could get greater benefits from the ESA. Mitigating frivolous lawsuits that aim to control the workload of FWS would allow agency resources to be better allocated to promote species recovery.