Endangered Species Transparency and Reasonableness Act of 2025
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Rep. McClintock, Tom [R-CA-5]
ID: M001177
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
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Latest Action
Subcommittee Hearings Held
July 22, 2025
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đź“Ť Current Status
Next: The bill moves to the floor for full chamber debate and voting.
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Senate Review
Passed Congress
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Became Law
đź“š How does a bill become a law?
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the 119th Congress. Let's dissect this farce and expose the underlying disease.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Endangered Species Transparency and Reasonableness Act of 2025 (HR 180) claims to promote transparency and accountability in the listing process under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). But, as with most congressional bills, the real purpose is to serve special interests while masquerading as a champion of good governance.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill requires the Secretary of the Interior to publish online the scientific and commercial data used in listing decisions. Sounds reasonable? Think again. This provision is designed to create a bureaucratic hurdle, allowing states and other stakeholders to delay or block listings by claiming that certain information is proprietary or sensitive.
Other provisions include:
* Allowing states to opt-out of disclosing certain information if it's prohibited by state law (read: giving states an excuse to hide data) * Requiring the Secretary to execute an agreement with the Secretary of Defense to prevent disclosure of classified information (because, you know, national security trumps environmental protection) * Mandating that the Secretary disclose expenditures related to ESA lawsuits (a clever way to intimidate and silence environmental groups)
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects:
* Environmental organizations: Will face increased scrutiny and bureaucratic hurdles when trying to list species * States: Will gain more control over the listing process, allowing them to prioritize economic interests over conservation * Industry groups: Will benefit from reduced regulatory oversight and increased access to sensitive information * The Department of Defense: Gets a free pass on disclosing classified information related to environmental protection
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a Trojan horse for special interests. By creating unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles, it will:
* Delay or block listings of endangered species, allowing industries to continue exploiting natural resources without consequence * Increase the influence of states and industry groups over the listing process, undermining the scientific integrity of ESA decisions * Intimidate environmental organizations by forcing them to disclose financial information related to lawsuits
In short, HR 180 is a cynical attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act under the guise of transparency and accountability. It's a classic case of "legislative lupus" – a disease where politicians prioritize special interests over the public good, while pretending to serve the greater good.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have better things to do than watch this farce unfold. Next patient, please!
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Rep. McClintock, Tom [R-CA-5]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 453 — Department of Health and Human Services and publishing epidemiological data from the individual states—a scientific data-gathering function. This information is crucial for medical and public health researchers around the country. On the other hand, the CDC is also responsible for making public health recommendations and policies—an inescapably political function. At times, these two functions are in tension or clear conflict. In February 2022, for example, it was reported that “[t]wo full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has pub- lished only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected,” much of which “could [have helped] state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control.” A CDC spokesman said that one of the reasons was “fear that the information might be misinterpreted.”4 These distinct functions should be separated into two entirely separate agen- cies with a firewall between them. We need a national epidemiological agency responsible only for publishing data and required by law to publish all of the data gathered from states and other sources. A separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations. The CDC can and should make assessments as to the health costs and benefits of health interventions, but it has limited to no capacity to measure the social costs or benefits they may entail. For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved? The CDC has no business making such inherently political (and often unconstitutional) assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane. The CDC’s initial COVID-19 testing failures were largely the result of that agen- cy’s prioritizing its own development and production of tests using its internal staff and facilities. The private sector is much better positioned to tackle the chal- lenges inherent in developing and manufacturing novel products, as illustrated by the relative success of the alternative approach to facilitating the development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics by private companies that was adopted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). When it comes to testing, the CDC’s role should similarly be to facilitate rather than supplant the efforts of private test developers, academic laboratories, state public health laboratories, and clinical testing providers. When responding to a novel pathogen, the CDC should focus on gathering and disseminating information, including specimens needed for development of positive controls and reference panels, and ensuring that test developers can develop and validate diagnostic tests. These changes will require a shift in priorities and culture at the CDC—and throughout HHS more broadly.5 Most problematically, the CDC presented itself as a kind of “super-doctor” for the entire nation. The CDC is a public health institution, not a medical institution. According to its mission statement, the agency focuses on “disease prevention and — 454 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activi- ties.”6 It is not qualified to offer (and usually does not purport to offer) professional medical opinions applicable to specific patients. From time to time, the CDC offers findings and recommendations that compe- tent medical practitioners often will consider in arriving at a professional medical judgment for a particular patient. In this respect, CDC guidelines are analogous to guidelines from other public health associations or medical societies: They are informative, not prescriptive. By statute or regulation, CDC guidance must be prohibited from taking on a prescriptive character. For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children “should be” masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building. Such decisions should be left to parents and medical providers. We have learned that when CDC says what people “should” do, it readily becomes a “must” backed by severe punishments, including criminal penalties. CDC should report on the risks and effectiveness of all infectious disease-mitigation measures dispassionately and leave the “should” and “must” policy calls to politically accountable parties. Conflicts of Interest. There was a time when the CDC could not take money from the pharmaceutical industry, but in 1992, the agency discovered a loophole in federal law that allowed it to accept pharma contributions through the nonprofit CDC Foundation. The money started flowing immediately: From 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation received $79.6 million from pharmaceutical corpo- rations like Pfizer, Biogen, and Merck.7 This practice presents a stark conflict of interest that should be banned. Data Systems. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the disastrous public health consequences of the CDC’s failure to follow multiple congressional mandates to modernize its data infrastructure. Current reporting methods are burdensome for frontline medical workers, yet they result only in fragmented data that are not available in real time or usable across systems. Congress should require HHS to prioritize the electronic collection and dis- semination of robust, privacy-protected data that better leverages existing systems while reducing burdens on clinicians. HHS should also enter into a public–private partnership with a data-management expert to develop a system that makes crit- ical information available to health care workers and policymakers in real time.8 The CDC operates several programs related to vaccine safety including the Vac- cine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS); Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD); and Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment (CISA) Project. Those functions and their associated funding should be transferred to the FDA, which is responsible for post-market surveillance and evaluation of all other drugs and biological products. Respect for Life and Conscience. The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine
Introduction
— 438 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and their membership has too often been handpicked to achieve certain politi- cal positions. In the Biden Administration, key EPA advisory committees were purged of balanced perspectives, geographic diversity, important regulatory and private-sector experience, and state, local, and tribal expertise. Contrary to con- gressional directives and recommendations from the GAO and intergovernmental associations, these moves eviscerated historic levels of participation on key com- mittees by state, local, and tribal members from 2017 to 2020. As a result, a variety of EPA regulations lack relevant scientific perspectives, increasing the risks of economic fallout and a failure of cooperative federalism. EPA also has repeatedly disregarded legal requirements regarding the role of these advisory committees and the scope of scientific advice on key regulations.46 Needed Science Policy Reforms Instead of allowing these efforts to be misused for scaremongering risk com- munications and enforcement activities, EPA should embrace so-called citizen science and deputize the public to subject the agency’s science to greater scrutiny, especially in areas of data analysis, identification of scientific flaws, and research misconduct. In addition, EPA should: l Shift responsibility for evaluating misconduct away from its Office of Scientific Integrity, which has been overseen by environmental activists, and toward an independent body. l Work (including with Congress) to provide incentives similar to those under the False Claims Act47 for the public to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct, thereby saving taxpayers from having to bear the costs involved in expending unnecessary resources. l Avoid proprietary, black box models for key regulations. Nearly all major EPA regulations are based on nontransparent models for which the public lacks access or for which significant costs prevent the public from understanding agency analysis. l Reject precautionary default models and uncertainty factors. In the face of uncertainty around associations between certain pollutants and health or welfare endpoints, EPA’s heavy reliance on default assumptions like its low-dose, linear non-threshold model bake orders of magnitude of risk into key regulatory inputs and drive flawed and opaque decisions. Given the disproportionate economic impacts of top-down solutions, EPA should implement an approach that defaults to less restrictive regulatory outcomes. — 439 — Environmental Protection Agency l Refocus its research activities on accountable real-world examinations of the efficacy of its regulations with a heavy emphasis on characterizing and better understanding natural, background, international, and anthropogenic contributions for key pollutants. It should embrace concepts laid out in the 2018 “Back-to-Basics Process for Reviewing National Ambient Air Quality Standards” memo48 to ensure that any science and risk assessment for the NAAQS matches congressional direction. Legislative Reforms While some reforms can be achieved administratively (especially in areas where EPA clearly lacks congressional authorization for its activities), Congress should prioritize several EPA science activity reforms: l Use of the Congressional Review Act for Congress to disapprove of EPA regulations and other quasi-regulatory actions and prohibit “substantially similar” actions in the future. l Reform EPA’s Science Advisory Board and other advisory bodies to ensure independence, balance, transparency, and geographic diversity. l Build on recent bipartisan proposals to increase transparency for advisory bodies, subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act49 as well as recommendations from the Administrative Conference of the U.S., to strengthen provisions for independence, accountability, geographic diversity, turnover, and public participation. This should include a prohibition on peer review activities for unaccountable third parties that lack independence or application of these same principles to non- governmental peer review bodies (including NASEM). l Add teeth to long-standing executive orders, memoranda, recommendations, and other policies to require that EPA regulations are based on transparent, reproducible science as well as that the data and publications resulting from taxpayer-funded activities are made immediately available to the public. l Reject funds for programs that have not been authorized by Congress (like IRIS) as well as peer review activities that have not been authorized by Congress. l Revisit and repeal or reform outdated environmental statutes. A high priority should be the repeal or reform of the Global Change Research Act of 1990,50 which has been misused for political purposes.
Introduction
— 534 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Delist the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems and defend to the Supreme Court of the United States the agency’s fact-based decision to do so.84 l Delist the gray wolf in the lower 48 states in light of its full recovery under the ESA.85 l Cede to western states jurisdiction over the greater sage-grouse, recognizing the on-the-ground expertise of states and preventing use of the sage-grouse to interfere with public access to public land and economic activity. l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10(j) of the ESA by re-introducing so-called “experiment species” populations into areas that no longer qualify as habitat and lie outside the historic ranges of those species, which brings with it the full weight of the ESA in areas previously without federal government oversight.86 l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to design and implement an impartial conservation triage program by prioritizing the allocation of limited resources to maximize conservation returns, relative to the conservation goals, under a constrained budget.87 l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to make all data used in ESA decisions available to the public, with limited or no exceptions, to fulfill the public’s right to know and to prevent the agency’s previous opaque decision-making. l Abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey and obtain necessary scientific research about species of concern from universities via competitive requests for proposals. l Direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to: (1) design and implement an Endangered Species Act program that ensures independent decision- making by ending reliance on so-called species specialists who have obvious self-interest, ideological bias, and land-use agendas; and (2) ensure conformity with the Information Quality Act.88 Office of Surface Mining. The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) was created by the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA)89 to administer programs for controlling the impacts of surface coal mining operations. Although the coal industry is contracting, coal constitutes — 535 — Department of the Interior 20 percent of the nation’s electricity and is a mainstay of many regional economies. The following actions should ensure OSM’s ability to perform its mission while com- plying with SMCRA and without interfering with the production of high-quality American coal: l Relocate the OSM Reclamation and Enforcement headquarters to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to recognize that the agency is field-driven and should be headquartered in the coal field.90 l Reduce the number of field coal-reclamation inspectors to recognize the industry is smaller. l Reissue Trump’s Schedule F executive order to permit discharge of nonperforming employees.91 l Permit coal company employees to benefit from the OSM Training Program, which is currently restricted to state and federal employees. l Revise the Applicant Violator System, the nationwide database for the federal and state programs, to permit federal and state regulators to consider extenuating circumstances. l Maintain the current “Ten-Day Notice” rule, which requires OSM to work with state regulators in determining if a SMCRA violation has taken place in recognition of the fact that a coal mining state with primacy has the lead in implementing state and federal law. l Preserve Directive INE-26, which relates to approximate original contour, a critical factor in permitting efficient and environmentally sound surface mining, especially in Appalachia.92 Western Water Issues. The American West, from the Great Plains to the Cas- cades Range, is arid, as recognized by John Wesley Powell during his famous trip across a large part of its length. Pursuant to an Executive Order signed by President Trump, and consistent with its authority along with other federal agencies, DOI’s Bureau of Reclamation must take the following actions: l Develop additional storage capacity across the arid west, including by: 1. Updating dam water control manuals for existing facilities during routine operations; and
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.