Fish and Wildlife Service

Since the first national wildlife refuge was established in 1903, the nation's wildlife refuge system has grown to include 521 refuges on more than 90 million acres. Members of Congress have raised concerns about whether the Fish and Wildlife Service established refuges with migratory bird funds after Congress denied appropriations from land and water funds for that purpose. GAO found that of the 23 refuges that the Service established between 1994 and 1998, only eight used federal funds--$4 million from the land and water fund. No migratory bird funds were used. The remaining 15 refuges were established with land that was donated, transferred, or exchanged. The Service is not currently required to inform Congress of refuges established through donations or other means outside the appropriations process at the time they are established. As a result, congressional appropriations committees may be unaware of these refuges until the Service later asks for land and water funds to expand them. The Service also need not inform Congress of estimated future operations and maintenance costs when it establishes refuges. When the Service does establish a refuge, however, it estimates the costs of future land acquisitions and of operations and maintenance for that specific refuge. GAO believes that it would be useful for the Service to provide this information to Congress. Although the Service's automated priority-setting system for land and water projects creates a national priority list, the priorities are (1) based on criteria that are too subjective and (2) do not represent a true relative ranking of projects.

GAO noted that: (1) of the 23 refuges FWS established in fiscal years 1994 through 1998, only 8 used federal funds and no migratory bird funds were used; (2) the remaining 15 refuges were established with land that was donated, transferred, or exchanged; FWS had requested but not received land and water funds for 3 of these refuges; (3) FWS subsequently expanded 20 of the 23 refuges, using land and water funds totalling $29 million for 14 refuges, and donations, transfers, or exchanges for the remainder; (4) because FWS is not required to inform Congress when refuges are established without appropriated funds, Congress may not know of these refuges and lacks the information necessary to factor the costs for their subsequent expansion into its decisionmaking about land and water fund appropriations; (5) FWS also expects to incur future operations and maintenance costs for the newly established refuges, which will be covered by appropriated funds, but it is not required to provide Congress with estimates of these future costs at the time it establishes a new refuge; (6) FWS uses different priority-setting processes for acquiring land with the two funds; (7) for land and water funds, it uses an automated system that creates several lists of acquisitions proposed under different statutory purposes and merges these lists into a single national priority list; (8) FWS team members charged with revising the priority system said that the criteria for the system are subjective, result in little differentiation between the projects, and do not reflect the true relative ranking of the listed projects; (9) FWS is developing a revised system for setting priorities for land acquisition to resolve these problems; (10) for migratory bird funds, each of FWS' regional offices sets its own priorities, according to FWS criteria for managing waterfowl habitat and the office's opportunities for purchasing the land within a year of receiving funding; (11) in requesting land and water funds for fiscal years 1994 through 1998, FWS followed its national priority list for about three-quarters of the 106 projects it submitted for funding; (12) it selected projects in sequential order, beginning with the number one priority project; (13) for the migratory bird fund, FWS requested funding for projects it was likely to acquire within that year and had preliminary purchase contracts.

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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