Some of those species up for consideration are found in decreasing numbers in Colorado, where WildEarth Guardians sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) over its failure to consider in a timely manner the group’s petition to list the Arapahoe snowfly.

Arapahoe snowfly.

Found only in the Cache la Poudre River drainage in northern Colorado, the fly is seen as an indicator species for the overall health of the river ecosystem as it increasingly succumbs to pressures from agricultural, recreational and industrial demands.

WildEarth had a total of 12 lawsuits pending, and the settlement deal struck last week resolves those suits and also schedules findings on petitions to list more than 600 additional species. WildEarth’s lawsuits will be dismissed, and the group has agreed not to sue over missed listing deadlines for the next six years.

“We and the government agree that it is long past time to get the endangered species listing program back on track,”, WildEarth Guardians Executive Director John Horning said in a release. “This is an important step toward protecting our rich biodiversity and stemming the extinction crisis in our country.”

Environmental groups hope this settlement fixes the “warranted but not listed” loophole that allows the federal government to keep species off the list for decades, meaning they don’t then receive the full protection of the law in the face of increasing development.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently signaled a shift in policy away from merely maintaining habitat for endangered species to actually taking steps to increase the amount of habitat.

However, environmental litigation itself would be somewhat of an endangered species under a bill floated by Republican Wyoming lawmakers Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso called the Government Litigation Savings Act.

H.R. 1996, co-sponsored by Republican Colorado Reps. Mike Coffman, Doug Lamborn and Scott Tipton would place severe limitations on the Equal Access to Justice Act, which former President Ronald Reagan signed into law in the 1980s. Environmental groups have lined up to defeat the bill.

In a statement, Meek said:

This election is about taking a stand and fighting for principles you believe in. Today’s Sierra Club co-endorsement is an insult to Florida’s environmental community. The Sierra Club has chosen to stand with a governor who stood on stage applauding as Sarah Palin chanted, ‘Drill, Baby, Drill,’ a governor who signed a law making it easier for big developers to drain the Everglades, a governor who endorsed a bill that would have allowed drilling just three miles away from Florida beaches, and a governor who used polluter talking points to attack climate change legislation.

The same is true, it seems, of the Democrats’ strategy for a host of other “midnight regulations” coming from the White House in recent months.

From The New York Times:

“Congress is going to have to roll up its sleeves and review these midnight regulations,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview, “because it’s clear that they are part of a desire for the administration, as it heads out the door, to put some ideological trophies on the wall.”

Mr. Wyden, the chairman of a subcommittee on natural resources, said he was focusing on a series of recently issued environmental rules. Among them are measures relaxing protections for endangered species, allowing uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, and making it easier for coal companies to dump mining debris in nearby streams and valleys. [...]

Spokesmen for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said they shared their colleagues’ desire to overturn some of the regulations but were waiting for guidance from the administration before adopting a specific strategy.

President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, said in a statement that their team was in the process of reviewing “these new regulations that are being issued during the final days” of the Bush administration and “will take appropriate steps to address any concerns in a timely manner.”

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) vows to tap the Congressional Review Act to overturn the rule easing protections on endangered species, according to The Times. Yet that law, which allows Congress to nullify White House regulations arriving in the final months of the president’s term, wouldn’t be the most efficient way to tackle Bush’s controversial rules. As The Times points out, the CRA would force lawmakers to debate and vote on each rule separately — a time-consuming process for a Congress with a full slate already.

The quicker route might be to adopt legislation, introduced last week by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), that would hinge the finalization of President George W. Bush’s midnight rules on approval by the incoming Obama  administration.

President George W. Bush (WDCpix)

It’s something of a tradition– administrations using their final weeks in power to ram through a slew of federal regulations. With the election grabbing the headlines, outgoing federal bureaucrats quietly propose and finalize rules that can affect the health and safety of millions.

The Bush administration has followed this tradition and expanded it. Up to 90 proposed regulations could be finalized before President George W. Bush leaves office Jan. 20. If adopted, these rules could weaken workplace safety protections, allow local police to spy in the “war on terror” and make it easier for federal agencies to ignore the Endangered Species Act.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

What’s more, the administration has accelerated the rule-making process to ensure that the changes it wants will be finalized by Nov. 22.

That’s a key date, Nov. 22. It is 60 days before the next administration takes control — and most federal rules go into effect 60 days after they have been finalized. It would be a major bureaucratic undertaking for the Obama administration to reverse federal rules already in effect.

“The Bush administration has thought through last-minute regulations much more than past administrations,” said Rick Melberth, director of OMB Watch, a nonprofit group that tracks federal regulations. “They’ve said, ‘Let’s not only get them finalized; let’s get them in effect.’”

So what are the new rules?

The Washington Independent has highlighted five regulations notable for their potential effect and the way they slipped through the regulatory process. Four could to be finalized by Nov. 22. One was already — on Election Day.

1) The Dept. of Labor proposed a regulation Aug. 30 that changes how workplace safety standards are met. Labor experts contend that the administration, which previously issued only one new workplace safety standard and that under court order, is trying to make it a bureaucratic nightmare for future administrations to make workplace safety rules.

Here’s what it would do:

Currently, if the Occupational Safety and Health Admin. or the Mine Health and Safety Admin. want to introduce a new safety standard on, say, the level of exposure to toxic chemicals, it issues what is called a notice of proposed rule-making. This notice is published in the Federal Register and then debated by labor, business and relevant federal agencies.

The new regulation would add an “advanced notice of proposed rule-making,” meaning OSHA and MSHA would have prove that, say, the said chemical was seriously harming workers.

This would open the door for industry to challenge the validity of the risk assessment and then, if necessary, the actual safety standard that may come from that risk assessment.

“The purpose of this sort of rule is to require agencies to spend more time on a regulation which gives them less of a chance to actually regulate,” said David Michaels, a professor of workplace safety at George Washington University, “You’re adding at least a year, maybe two years, to the process.”

The regulation has not been finalized.

2) The administration proposed a rule that changes the employer-employee relationship laid out in the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act.

Here’s what it would do:

The Family and Medical Leave Act says that employers must give their workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave if they are sick or need to take care of a family member or newborn. The employer’s health-care staff can check the legitimacy of the family or medical leave claim with the employee’s doctor or health-care provider.

The proposed regulation would allow the employer to directly speak with the employee’s doctor or health-care provider. The employer could also ask employees to provide more medical documentation of their conditions.

Why such a rule — which may threaten an employee’s privacy– is needed is unclear. The only study the Labor Dept. has done on the act was in 2000. The department collected comments from employers before issuing the proposed regulation, but a report analyzing the comments was never issued.

The regulation also would gives employees the right to waive their rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, making it the first national labor law to be optional. A worker, for instance, cannot waive his right to earn a minimum wage or get paid more for overtime.

The regulation was finalized on Election Day.

3) The Dept. of Health and Human Services proposed a rule Sept. 26 that would expand the reasons that physicians or health care entities could decline to provide any procedure to include moral and religious grounds. The language of the regulation says the department hopes to correct “an attitude toward the health-care profession that health-care professionals and institutions should be required to provide or assist in the provision of medicine or procedures to which they object, or else risk being subjected to discrimination.”

Here’s what it would do:

The rule change seems to apply to abortion. But they are already several rules that say physicians or health-care entities can deny an abortion request. Some women’s health advocates contend that the proposed regulation’s broad language is meant to increase the number of physicians who not only don’t provide abortions but don’t provide contraception.

“Contraception is certainly the target of this rule,” contends Marylin Keefe, director for Reproductive Health at the National Partnership for Women and Families. “The moral and religious objections of health-care workers are now starting to take precedence over patients.”

The regulation is notable for another reason. A rule involving an employee’s religious rights must be referred to the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission, yet the commission was never told of this proposed regulation.

A bureaucratic battled erupted when EEOC’s legal counsel, Reed Russell, wrote a regulation comment (pdf) blasting both the substance of the proposed rule and its disregard for the rule-making process.

The regulation has not been finalized.

4) On July 31, the Justice Dept. proposed a regulation that would allow state and local law enforcement agencies to collect “intelligence” information on individuals and organizations even if the information is unrelated to a criminal matter.

“This is a continuum that started back on 9/11 to reform law enforcement and the intelligence community to focus on the terrorism threat,” said Bush homeland security adviser Kenneth L. Wainstein in a statement.

Critics say it could infringe on civil liberties.

Here’s what it would do:

“It expands local law enforcement’s ability to investigate criminal activity that it deems suspicious,” said Melberth of OMB Watch. “But what’s suspicious to you may not be suspicious to me. They could be investigating community organizations they think are two or three steps away from a terrorist group.”

The regulation has not been finalized.

5) Before a federal agency approves any construction project– anything from building a dam to a post office — government officials must consult the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. These two agencies enforce the Endangered Species Act, and they can veto any project that adversely affects an animal on the endangered species list.

Here’s what it would do:

A regulation proposed by the Interior Dept. Aug. 12 would end this approval process. “It destroys a system of checks and balances that have been in place for two decades,” claimed Bob Davison, senior scientist at Defenders of the Wildlife. “[A federal agency] wants to go forward with a project that [it wants] to do. So you need an independent agency to look at the decision.”

Davison is not the only conservation advocate up in arms. The Interior Dept. has received 200,000 public comments, which may affect the final rule.

Or not — the department shortened the comment period from 60 to 30 days in its effort to get the regulation finalized.

In May, White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten vowed that the administration would propose no regulations after June 1. He and White House spokesman Tony Fratto have repeatedly stated their contempt for what they call “midnight regulations.”

Yet with the exception of the Family and Medical Leave changes, each of these regulations were proposed after June 1. And if finalized, they will effect worker’s safety, women’s health-care choices, local police powers and endangered species.

“It was a pretty resounding election,” said Keefe of the National Partnership for Women and Families. “But this administration acts like it still has a mandate.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service are required to analyze the new rules to make sure they don’t violate the National Environmental Policy Act. This law requires federal agencies to come up with an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for a proposed rule that could harm the quality of the human environment. According to Wetzler, coming up with an EIS is a long and involved process.

In addition, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service have to undertake “internal” consultations to determine the rules’ potential effects on species protected by the Endangered Species Act before the rules can be finalized. Yet another involved process, Wetzler says.

The Bush administration hopes to pass its new rules by November. It’s unclear how it plans to carry out the necessary reviews and consultations in a matter of days without violating any laws.

The agency actually received a total of 300,000 comments, but says 100,000 of those were form letters.

Just 15 employees of the Interior Dept.’s Fish and Wildlife Service are going through all the comments and plan to complete the process by close of business Friday. That means each employee would have to review seven letters every minute for the rest of this week. Some comments can get up to hundreds of pages long. That’s why this process usually takes months.

The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Nick Rahall (D-W.V.), called this 32-hour deadline a “last-ditch attempt to undermine the long-standing integrity of the Endangered Species program,” according to The AP.

If you haven’t been following this story closely, let’s recap. So far, it seems the Bush administration has gone to great lengths to rush through its plan for the Endangered Species Act.

First, the White House tried keeping the plan hush-hush before it was leaked to The AP, at which point a last-minute, emergency press conference was called.

Second, the Bush administration decided that Congress would not have to review and approve the plan.

Third, the administration tried to get away with a 30-day public comment period, which is no time at all as far as public comment periods go. After facing serious backlash, it was forced to extend that period by another 30 days — which is still a really short period of time.

Now, the administration is taking just four days to review the many public comments.

Needless to say, things don’t work this fast in government. Many environmentalists say this is an obvious attempt to streamline an exceedingly unpopular proposal. But why is President George W. Bush working so hard to overhaul the Endangered Species Act on his way out of office?

Jamie Rappaport Clark, former head of the Fish and Wildlife Service and current executive director of Defenders of Wildlife, says the administration is responding to heavy pressure from industrial interests. “Somebody has lit a fire under these guys to get this done in due haste,” Clark told The AP.

If the White House manages to pass the proposed plan before a new president is sworn in, it could take a long time for that plan to be overturned. A new administration would have to launch a new public comment period and a new review process, which could take months or even years  — at least it usually does.

Multiple conservation groups are ready to take legal action if the current plan gets through. But we’ll have to wait and see how hard that would be and how long it would take, especially with the current administration out the door and a new one on its way in.

It’s not just because endangered-species workers love animal analogies. It’s because the new rule gives government agencies the power, sans oversight, to decide for themselves whether their own projects violate environmental law.

The public comment period on the Bush plan ends Tuesday. Over the past few days, 120 conservation groups have sent in about 100,000 angry comments opposing the rule change, reports Reuters. They say the plan is a scheme to gut the 35-year-old law.

Bush’s Interior Dept. says the goal of the proposed regulation is to cut red tape impeding government projects.

The one thing that’s clear is that the rule would fundamentally change the way the Endangered Species Act is implemented. If conservation groups decide that the change violates the law itself, the Interior Dept. can likely expect a lawsuit if its rule is approved.

With the conventions, the first African-American to receive a major party’s nomination, Sen. John McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav, there is reason to believe that the Bush administration’s attempts to alter the ESA could go overlooked.

I suspect that’s why E&E TV features an interview today on the proposed ESA changes with the National Wildlife Federation’s John Kostyack

“We feel that there is a serious risk that this will pass,” Kostyack tells E&E’s Monica Trauzzi. He also does a good job of explaining the proposed rules for newcomers to this issue. Watch the interview here.

Angler, Via Web Ecoist

Web Ecoist showcases “20 of the World’s Weirdest Endangered Species” today with some fantastic photos of such exotic creatures as the Solenodon (not a dinosaur) and the world’s rarest parrot called the Kakapo. If the Bush administration has its way, the Endangered Species Act will be rendered useless, potentially dooming these animals. If you want to weigh in on the rule being proposed to change the law (whether you think it’s a great rule or hogwash), here’s how.