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In particular, the administration is considering giving greater power to states to protect animals and plants under ESA, Fish and Wildlife Service chief Dale Hall told the House Interior Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. Hall said the administration would also rewrite its "adverse modification" rules that oversee destruction of species' habitat, partially in response to courts that have struck down the administration's approach.

The documents in question were publicly distributed by the Center for Biological Diversity on Tuesday morning in coordination with posting of a critical feature article on Salon.com. The draft, which was 114 pages long and was said to have circulated within the Interior Department for eight months, appears to represent an across-the-board overhaul of regulations that would scale back the government's power to list species or prevent disruptive activities in their habitat.

Kieran Suckling of CBD, which posted the draft regulations on its Web site and distributed them to news media, said it reads like a wish list of how to change the act to make it comply with changes the administration has sought without success in court. "This is exactly what they have been trying to do for the last six years," Suckling said.

In response, Interior officials said the document does not necessarily reflect the agency's current work on the law.

It was dated from June 2006 but appeared to include revisions and edits made as recently as last month.

'Not the latest draft

"They are a very early draft and not the latest draft," said Chris Tollefson, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman. Current ideas for regulatory changes are "not anything close" to the draft being circulated, Tollefson told Land Letter.

That message was echoed by Hall during his appearance before the House Interior Committee. The draft was the result of "brainstorming" last year to "put everything on the table" about what ESA changes might be made, Hall told the House panel. Since then, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne came on board and instituted "cooperative conservation" listening sessions to shape the department's approach to ESA.

Career-level staff are now working on recommendations, which will go to Hall and then to Kempthorne, Hall said. The leaked draft was merely a starting point and the edits that were made in the "first two days" of the staff working on the proposal, he said.

Nonetheless, congressional Democrats blasted the administration over the attempt to rewrite the rules. House Interior Appropriations Committee Chairman Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) called the administration's approach "worrisome." "If you are going to make comprehensive changes, you have got to come to the U.S. Congress," Dicks told Hall. "That is not going to go down up here."

While possible statutory changes to ESA were major battle in Congress last year, the issue seemed to abate with the assumption of control by Senate Democrats. Indeed, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), this week reiterated her intent to "vigorously oppose any weakening of the Endangered Species Act."

However, the effort to revamp ESA received some support from at least one Republican lawmaker. Rep. John Peterson (R-Pa.) encouraged Hall to plow forward, saying he would be "as old as Moses" before the House and Senate ever reached agreement on legislative changes to the law. "I urge you to follow your heart and let the chips fall where they may," Peterson said.

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