On the recordJuly 25, 2011
I thank the gentleman for yielding. Yes, today's ESA is so highly contentious, political, and litigious that it has become a failure of public policy. Funding authorization for ESA programs expired nearly two decades ago, but because we have continued to fund them, ESA reform continues to stay on the back burner. This bill calls for a ``timeout'' for unauthorized funding of new critical habitat or ESA listing decisions in order to encourage authorizers and stakeholders to come to the table to bring the ESA into the 21st century, which it is not now.
