The House Agriculture Committee this spring passed its Farm Bill with full Republican support and four votes from committee Democrats. It is awaiting a floor vote. In the Senate, the majority and minority have released their own wish lists of priorities for a Senate Farm Bill, but no official language has been introduced. There is concern if either version will come to fruition due to differences on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers. The NWTF has signed onto two broad stakeholder letters asking Congress to work to pass a bipartisan bill this year.
The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act of 2023, which is currently in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, would provide funding for the conservation or restoration of wildlife and plant species of greatest conservation need. The House’s more conservative version, America’s Wildlife Habitat Restoration Act passed the Committee on Natural Resources and is awaiting a floor vote. The Senate majority has signaled it would not take up the House version due to its lower funding levels and other differences.
The EXPLORE Act, the House version of the America’s Outdoor Recreation Act, aims to improve the lives of outdoorsmen and women while also expanding access to America’s public lands and waters. The EXPLORE Act passed the House and has now been received by the Senate. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR), House Natural Resources Committee chairman, and Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) introduced the Fix Our Forests Act this spring. FOFA offers practical solutions needed to help forests on a landscape scale, protect communities in wildfire prone locations, encourage agency transparency and promote wildfire mitigation innovations. There is good indication FOFA will be taken up by the full House this fall.
The NWTF endorsed the Wildlife Movement Through Partnerships Act introduced in the House by Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA). It authorizes existing federal programs to support locally driven, collaborative conservation projects to restore and conserve wildlife migration corridors.
The NWTF has also endorsed the Trust the Science Act. This bill directs the Department of the Interior to remove protections for the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
The NWTF endorsed Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-WI) Wildlife-Agriculture Disease Prevention Act, a bill to create intra-governmental and intra-agency collaboration, which will create a coordinator position and open communications channels to monitor and mitigate the transmission of wildlife and zoonotic diseases between wildlife, domesticated animals, livestock and humans.