An elephant at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.Media Drum World/ZUMA
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service, the nation’s only government agency dedicated to conserving plants and animals, has frozen its vast portfolio of international conservation grants, Vox has learned. The agency, which supports wildlife protection in the US and overseas, ordered many of the organizations it funds to stop work related to their grants and cut its communication with them. According to USFWS internal communication shared anonymously with Vox, the agency has frozen grants for international projects that amount to tens of millions of dollars.
The freeze jeopardizes dozens of projects to conserve wildlife around the world, from imperiled sea turtles in Central America to elephants in Africa. Grant programs from the federal government protect species whose habitats straddle borders, and they also benefit Americans, such as by reducing the risk of pathogens like coronaviruses from spilling into human populations.
“I hope that most people care about wildlife, even if I fear they do not.”
On January 20, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for a three-month pause on “foreign development assistance.” The effort suspended funding under the US Agency for International Development, the nation’s humanitarian and development agency, as part of a broader effort to dismantle the agency (which does literal lifesaving work). USAID also funds biodiversity conservation overseas, on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Original source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/us-fish-wildlife-service-conservation-funding-freeze-pause-endangered-species-animals/
