A US district court on Thursday restored federal protections for the gray wolf, reversing a 2020 policy decision that had dissolved their favored status under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

In so holding, Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White of the US District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland awarded summary judgment to a group of environmental advocacy groups that had challenged the decision by the US Department of the Interior and its Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the gray wolf from the ESA. The plaintiffs argued that the delisting had violated the ESA — described in the case as “the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species ever enacted by any nation.”

The gray wolf had once been widespread in the US, but populations were devastated by human activity following the arrival of Europeans to the United States. Federal authorities declared the species endangered between 1966 and 1976, and ultimately afforded them the relevant protections under the ESA.

In 2020, the administration of former president Donald Trump opted to remove these protections, attempting to spin the decision as a victory for conservation: “After more than 45 years as a listed species (under the ESA), the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery. Today’s announcement simply reflects the determination that this species is neither a threatened nor endangered species based on the specific factors Congress has laid out in the law,” then-Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt said at the time. “Today’s action reflects the Trump Administration’s continued commitment to species conservation based on the parameters of the law and the best scientific and commercial data available,” he said. President Joe Biden’s administration had backed up the decision.

When listing or delisting a species, the ESA requires the federal government to consider several factors, including: present of threatened destruction, modification, or curtailment of the species’ habitat or range; over-utilization of the species for commercial, recreational, scientific or educational purposes; disease or predation; the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms to protect the species; and other natural or manmade factors that could affect the species’ continued existence. But the government’s determination that gray wolves were no longer threatened or endangered was riddled with holes, White found in the ruling handed down Thursday.

In particular, White determined that the government had:

• Erroneously relied on the definition of “species” as an independent basis for delisting gray wolves;
• Failed to evaluate the full-listed gray wolf species — opting to limit the scope of their research to the Great Lakes and Northern Rocky Mountains, when they should have been examining populations across the lower 48 states of the US;
• Found that the government failed to consider the status of wolves along the West Coast in their delisting determination; and
• Used an “arbitrary and capricious” interpretation when examining what it described as a significant portion of the gray wolves’ range.

The ruling effectively recategorized the gray wolf as a threatened species — a species “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range” — and ordered the reinstatement of the relevant ESA protections. Notably, the ruling extends to gray wolves across the lower 48 states, with certain exceptions, including gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, due to the fact that Congress voted in 2011 to repeal the protections of this particular gray wolf population.