Conservative critics who grouse about the Endangered Species Act won a victory Monday with a federal judge’s ruling that the Fish and Wildlife Service should have considered costs when crafting protections for a threatened lesser prairie chicken population.
In a ruling that would bring dollars and cents into more ESA decision-making, Texas-based District Judge David Counts concluded that the so-called 4(d) rule written for one lesser prairie chicken population lacked the necessary assessment of what the species protections could actually cost.
“Because Fish and Wildlife failed to account for costs, to include cost of compliance, it failed to consider all relevant factors and ignored important aspects of the problem,” Counts wrote.
Count was appointed during Trump’s first term to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, where he works from a courthouse in the city of Midland.
