Jake Li worries about what’s next for his former Fish and Wildlife Service colleagues.
Shoved out of his dream job as assistant director of the agency’s endangered species program, Li is now starting over this week as vice president for biodiversity policy with Defenders of Wildlife. It’s a job in which he will likely critique FWS decisions even as he feels sympathy for the organization’s career employees.
“Take any organization in a situation where it can’t even meet a lot of its legal deadlines, and then you slash it by 20 something percent, almost overnight,” Li said in an interview. “How is it supposed to continue functioning?”
The Drexel University and Cornell Law School graduate then enumerated the various tasks that the administration has imposed on a shrunken FWS workforce: rewriting Endangered Species Act regulations, expediting energy development on federal lands, securing a reliable critical mineral supply, convening the ESA emergency committee known as the God Squad.
