Congress's investigative arm this week accused the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) of playing politics with the nation's animals. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report charging that U.S. Department of Interior service apparently decided which animals to designate—and protect—as endangered species based on political rather than scientific criteria. Fish & Wildlife has been subject to a number of recent congressional probes. The GAO last year found that the FWS's former deputy assistant secretary Julie MacDonald had violated federal information disclosure rules by sharing internal agency documents with industry lobbyists such as the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Pacific Legal Foundation, and that she stood to gain financially from her agency's decision to delist the Sacramento splittail fish because she and her husband's farming business located near the fish's habitat would have been subject to restrictions.
