Trump Seeks to Downgrade Protection for Endangered Beetle
- Developers forced to bait burying beetles with dead animals
- Oil group sued government to take insect off endangered list
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The Trump administration is seeking to downgrade Endangered Species Act protections for a one-inch beetle that has confounded oil pipelines and drilling in Oklahoma and Nebraska.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to lower the American burying beetle’s classification from “endangered” to “threatened” follows a review of the insect’s status and years of lobbying by the oil industry to strip its protections. The agency is also proposing a narrower suite of protections it says are tailored “to only those the beetle needs for recovery.”