March 7, 2025

The Honorable Doug Burgum

Secretary
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240-0001

Dear Secretary Burgum,

In September 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) approved an impractical and
grossly expensive plan to kill 470,000 barred owls across the Pacific Northwest to stop the long
and steady decline of spotted owls. By extrapolating on costs for prior kills of owls, conducted on a
small scale, this plan would require $1.35 billion over the course of thirty years to hunt and kill one
owl species to the benefit of another.

In the spirit of fiscal responsibility and ethical conservation, we urge you to halt all spending on
this plan to mass kill a native, range-expanding North American owl species. Up to this point, there
has been no Congressional oversight of this project, and the Final Environmental Impact Statement
from USFWS was devoid of any meaningful cost estimates. The report also lacks any sufficient
detailed description of how such a project would be carried out over an area spanning 24 million
acres– from the Bay Area, California to the Canadian border.

Since 1990, USFWS has listed the Spotted Owl as a threatened species in accordance with the
Endangered Species Act of 1973. In the preceding decades, the federal government has gone to
extreme lengths, including limiting logging on millions of acres of federal land in the Pacific
Northwest, in an effort to save the embattled and declining species. To this date, there has been
no demonstrable increase in spotted owl populations. This latest plan is an example of our federal
government attempting to supersede nature and control environmental outcomes at great cost to
American taxpayers.

USFWS now argues that the rapid decline of the Spotted Owl is due to competition from its
just slightly larger relative, the Barred Owl, which is a range-expanding bird that long occupied
two-thirds of the land area of the United States and has now colonized forests in the Pacific
Northwest over the last 130 years.

As an August 2024 op-ed from the New York Times notes, “it is unclear that killing barred owls
will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction.” More than 260
stakeholder organizations are now on record in opposition to the plan, including animal welfare
groups and 20 Audubon Society chapters. A bipartisan group of state lawmakers from range
states have also weighed in and urged the federal government to nix the plan – the largest-ever
raptor-killing scheme conceived by any nation.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board dismissed the plan, saying: “[l]et nature take its course
and leave it to the owls.” Southwest Washington’s local paper, the Columbian, stated that it
“seems unlikely that shooting hundreds of thousands of barred owls will slow the evolutionary
process that is taking place in the forests of the Northwest.” We hope you will take into account the
following points:

The plan’s outcome does not justify the large cost assessed to U.S. taxpayers.
USFWS proposes to authorize trained shooters from government agencies, Native American
tribes, private companies, as well as local landowners to enter obscure forest areas to kill nearly
half a million barred owls. Contextually, in December 2024, USFWS awarded a $4.5 million
grant to the Hoopa Valley Native American Tribe to kill just 1,500 barred owls. The cost associated
is $3,000 per owl hunted, which is the source of the $1.35 billion estimate. This is an inappropriate
and inefficient use of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

There is little precedent for success.

The U.S. government has conducted wildlife control programs with limited success, mostly on
island ecosystems or other areas with natural barriers to entry. There is no precedent for success
over a vast and accessible land area like the 24-million-acre patchwork of lands.

Barred owls are a range-expanding, native North American species that have been
protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for more than 100 years.
Range expansion is a core biological behavior for nearly all species. To claim that animals are
invasive because they expand their range denies dynamism in ecological systems, and use of that
term in this circumstance is simplistic.

We urge you to take immediate action to ground this costly and impractical plan.

Sincerely,

Troy E. Nehls Sydney Kamlager-Dove

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Josh Harder Marjorie Taylor Greene

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Troy A. Carter, Sr. Jefferson Van Drew

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Steve Cohen Brian Fitzpatrick

Member of Congress Member of Congress
Andrew Ogles Lance Gooden
Member of Congress Member of Congress

Donald G. Davis Tony Wied

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Gilbert Ray Cisneros, Jr. Lois Frankel

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Summer L. Lee Deborah K. Ross

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Scott Fitzgerald Scott Perry

Member of Congress Member of Congress

Anna Paulina Luna

Member of Congress