Delist the Gray Wolf. Then Delist the Administrative State

Predators personified

The gray wolf and the modern federal bureaucrat have far more in common than most Americans probably realize.

Both are apex creatures with few natural predators. Both expand their range aggressively once protections are in place. Both impose real costs by preying on the private property of innocent bystanders. And both are shielded by law from the kind of accountability that once kept them in check.

Not least, progressives bond with both in a politically spiritual, litigative love kind of way.

For the gray wolf, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides cover, along with a judicial system that has repeatedly overturned the decisions of elected officials and wildlife scientists, even after recovery goals were met. For the federal bureaucrat, guardianship issues from something even more potent: an administrative-judicial alliance that treats agency power as presumptively legitimate and popular self-government as something to be managed, mocked, and ultimately kicked to the curb.

Enter now, from stage right, a piece of legislation by Wisconsin’s own Rep. Tom Tiffany and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert that concerns both sets of creatures.

Just not in the way progressive environmentalists would like. Like a sword to their soul and a dagger to their heart, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act would restore a 2020 rule that delisted the wolf and restored authority to state lawmakers and wildlife officials to responsibly manage gray wolf populations.

That’s important in and of itself, but the bill does a whole lot more by including something that has become all but extinct in the swamp of modern Washington. That is, it reasserts Congress’s constitutional authority to make law without asking the courts for permission and prevents the courts from later meddling on behalf of environmentalists and bureaucrats in that lawmaking.

Specifically, on December 18, the U.S. House passed the short but consequential bill directing the secretary of the interior to reissue a final 2020 rule removing the gray wolf from the endangered and threatened wildlife list and prohibiting any judicial review of that reissued rule. The bill heads now to the Senate for consideration.

In so doing, it not only delists the wolf but also points the way to delisting the administrative state itself. And it does all this in just three sentences:

See how easy this is.

Of course, Boebert, Tiffany, and colleagues did not write their legislation in a vacuum. While wolf populations in the Great Lakes region have exploded far beyond recovery benchmarks established decades ago, livestock losses have mounted, pets have been killed, and concerns about public safety have grown exponentially.

All the while, rural communities have been told repeatedly that their experiences are unfortunate but legally irrelevant. Which, unfortunately, means they are politically unimportant. Progressives may love sanctuaries for wolves and bureaucrats, but there’s no love lost for the habitats of human beings.

The sky is falling—not

The two critical issues the bill addresses—federal management of the gray wolf under the ESA and the recurring intervention of federal courts after executive branch delisting decisions—have been intertwined for more than two decades. The solutions proffered neither impose scientific certainty, that mythical veil of settled science the Left often wears, nor makes management policy. Rather, they embrace democratic process, transferring management decisions to the states where they belong and preventing the high priests of the temple of the unelected from interfering, as is Congress’s constitutional prerogative.

The bill does not direct the agency to make new factual findings or policy determinations. Congress simply orders the reinstatement of an already completed regulatory action, vesting management of the wolf populations in the states. It reflects Congress’s intention to interrupt a cycle in which the gray wolf is delisted based on population recovery data, only to have those decisions vacated by radical federal courts after years of litigation.

That is important to know because progressives will have you believe otherwise. Already, the environmentalists are howling at the moon. Earthjustice said the bill’s passage put wolves in the crosshairs, while the Sierra Club called it reckless because “wolves still need federal protections to recover.”

That’s not true. The congressional report on the legislation put it this way:

When gray wolves were first listed under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s, populations in the lower 48 states had fallen to only a few hundred animals, largely confined to northern Minnesota. The listing reflected decades of overhunting, predator control programs, and habitat loss.

Over subsequent decades, though, federal and state recovery programs have been spectacularly successful. By the time the Department of the Interior finalized the 2020 delisting rule, there were more than 6,000 gray wolves across the lower 48 states, with robust populations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

The Trump-era rule concluded that the gray wolf could no longer meet the ESA’s statutory definition of an endangered or threatened species. That conclusion was hardly Trumpian. The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama reached similar conclusions, only to be reversed through litigation.

In February 2022, a California federal district judge vacated the 2020 delisting rule. The court concluded that FWS had failed to adequately demonstrate that wolf populations would remain viable outside their core Great Lakes and northern Rockies regions.

The practical consequences were immediate. According to Tiffany’s office, in Wisconsin, wolf depredation claims increased for the third consecutive year following relisting. In 2024 alone, the state paid more than $320,000 in compensation for wolf-caused livestock losses, one of the highest totals in four decades. Similar political and financial conflicts have been reported throughout the Upper Midwest and Mountain West, particularly in areas where wildlife agencies had previously managed wolf populations without federal oversight. Tiffany and Boebert correctly argue that these outcomes reflect not a scientific dispute about recovery, but a procedural and political problem in how delisting decisions are reviewed and reversed.

In fact, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act is not the first time Congress has intervened directly in wolf management, nor the first time it has limited judicial review in doing so. In 2011, Congress adopted a two-sentence rider to a defense appropriations bill directing the Department of the Interior to reissue a 2009 rule delisting gray wolves in Montana and Idaho and providing that the action “shall not be subject to judicial review.”

Environmental groups challenged the amendment on separation-of-powers grounds, arguing that Congress had improperly encroached on the judiciary’s authority.

In 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the delisting, finding that Congress changed the law governing wolf management rather than directing courts to reach a specific outcome. As such, the court determined, the amendment did not violate constitutional principles. That ruling matters because it established clear constitutional parameters: Congress may remove a subject from judicial review by changing the law itself, but it may not dictate how courts decide cases under unchanged law:

And that is what is happening here. What’s more, the progressives conveniently fail to mention what the Pet and Livestock Protection Act declines to address. It does not permanently delist the gray wolf. Congress could have amended the ESA to carve out wolves categorically; it did not. It does not bar future judicial review of new agency actions or new listings. It does not prevent Congress itself from revisiting wolf management if population conditions change. Nor does it strip courts of authority over state wildlife policies implemented after delisting.

Once the wolf is delisted, state management decisions remain subject to state law, state courts, and political accountability within each state. Federal courts retain their ordinary jurisdiction over other ESA matters and administrative actions.

The bill’s opponents certainly argue that blocking judicial review undermines scientific integrity and politicizes species management, as if they haven’t already done that themselves. The dissenting views in the House committee report also emphasized wolves’ ecological role as keystone species and warned that state-led management could lead to population declines, citing past hunting seasons in Wisconsin, Idaho, and Montana.

But overall the committee report reflected an opposing and more robust assessment based in decades of agency data, repeated recovery findings, and the demonstrated capacity of state wildlife agencies to manage thousands of species without federal supervision.

The disagreement, in other words, is not about whether wolves matter ecologically but about whether the federal judiciary should serve as the final authority after bipartisan majorities in Congress and multiple administrations have concluded that recovery has occurred.

The Question Congress Is Actually Answering

Of course, the larger issue raised by the bill is Congress’s overall authority to limit federal court jurisdiction.

This is not a unique assertion of power. It is an old one, found directly in the constitution’s language and exercised intermittently—way too intermittently—throughout American history. Its use here shines a light on why it should be used more often than it has been, and it raises the question of why that has not been the case.

Article III of the Constitution establishes the judicial branch but does not vest it with self-defining authority. That is to say, it cannot define the scope of its own jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction is explicitly limited, and its appellate jurisdiction exists only “with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

That language is not an afterthought. The Founders inserted it because they did not intend for federal courts to be the final, uncontested arbiters of every constitutional or statutory question. They gave Congress both the authority to create inferior lower courts (not to mention the authority to abolish them) and the responsibility to define and delineate their jurisdiction. To be sure, Congress may not use its power to strip jurisdiction in a way that violates other constitutional provisions, such as the Due Process Clause or free speech, or to achieve a specific outcome in a pending case in a manner that violates the separation of powers, but beyond that it holds the whip of the rider.

The Founders knew exactly what would happen if there was no check on judicial power—pretty much what has happened in an era of congressional surrender. Not that Congress has not exercised its jurisdictional control at times. At various points it has restricted or withdrawn judicial review of immigration determinations, veterans’ benefits, military matters, and foreign affairs. But the fortitude to touch the third rail of judicial power—judicial review—has been a courage uncommonly summoned.

Indeed, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), there is a strong presumption in favor of judicial review, for institutional power seeks institutional comfort. Courts are authorized to set aside agency decisions deemed arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law, or procedurally deficient, or to defer to them, as the case may be. This framework has become the default mechanism through which regulatory policy is contested or, more likely, reinforced.

Many consider the APA to be the bureaucracy’s constitution, an imposter posing as a subsidiary of the actual constitution. It is a statute, and like any statute, it yields where Congress expressly provides otherwise. The APA itself recognizes this, stating that judicial review does not apply where “statutes preclude judicial review.” The wolf delisting bill operates squarely within that exception.

The larger institutional question

In one sense, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act is not an entire story but a chapter in a long testimonial of judicial and bureaucratic butchery of both science and the people’s will.

Tiffany’s bill’s provisions underscore a recurring pattern of institutional undercutting by the courts and the administrative state. The conclaves and collectives of the unelected join arms to bully merely passing-through elected visitors. How dare they try to run the household!

Over time, the effect is not merely policy failure but a fundamental reallocation of power from politically accountable branches to life-tenured courts interpreting open-ended statutes in ways that support the government’s progressive, institutional agenda. Congress alone owns the means to short-circuit the cycle, and jurisdiction-stripping (as well as jurisdictional channeling) is one of them. It is neither radical nor unprecedented, though it has been used too sparingly—often only after prolonged institutional frustration.

The Founders understood something modern Americans are taught to forget: judges are human beings, subject to ambition, ideology, and institutional self-interest like anyone else. Lifetime tenure was meant to insulate them from political pressure, not to elevate them into philosopher-kings immune from restraint.

Thomas Jefferson understood this danger clearly when he warned in 1820 of a too-powerful judiciary:

Jefferson did not oppose courts. He opposed unchecked courts. That distinction has been lost.

These days, appellate court judges have gone rogue across the landscape, issuing universal injunctions every bit as undemocratic as the judges who have repeatedly ignored science, the experts, and the people to needlessly “protect” wolves.

And so what we hear out there is the thud, thud, thudding of the rubber-stamping courts as they rush to please the administrative state and the progressive agenda. Jurisdiction stripping is one way to rein judges and courts back in, short of outright abolishing them. Granted, abolishing district courts seems like a rather extreme measure, but then so does packing the Supreme Court, and that doesn’t stop progressives from promising to do it when they return to power.

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was another who preached the gospel of a constrained court.

An unrestrained government, which an unregulated and out-of-control federal judiciary represents, undermines not merely states’ autonomy, Paul said, but the entire American system of separation of powers and checks and balances.

Whether future Congresses will use its constitutional authority more broadly remains an open question. For now, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act stands as a reminder that the balance of powers envisioned by the Founders depends not only on constitutional text, but on the willingness of elected lawmakers to carry it out.

Let’s hope the Senate concurs.