National Wildlife Refuges

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO evaluated the Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS) management of the secondary uses of national wildlife refuges, focusing on whether FWS met the purposes for which the refuges were established.

GAO found that: (1) although the refuges served their primary purpose of providing habitats and safe havens for wildlife, 90 percent of the 428 refuges had at least one secondary use, 70 percent had at least 7 different secondary uses, and more than 30 percent had at least 14 different secondary uses; (2) managing such secondary uses as public recreation, mining, and grazing increasingly diverted management attention from the wildlife functions that refuge staff were trained to perform and caused direct harm to wildlife resources; (3) FWS could not measure the impact of harmful uses on refuge performance, since it did not measure each refuge's wildlife enhancement potential; (4) refuge managers attributed the harmful uses of refuges to external pressures and limitations in FWS jurisdiction over refuge resources; (5) FWS allowed uses that refuge managers believed harmful in order to satisfy local public and economic interests due to its failure to periodically reevaluate ongoing secondary uses, as required; and (6) FWS jurisdictional limitations included lack of ownership of subsurface mineral rights, shared jurisdiction over navigable waterways within refuge boundaries, and military access to refuge lands and airspace that prevented it from stopping many activities proven to be harmful to wildlife resources.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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