“Over the past three decades, the Endangered Species Act has become a model of incompetence, ineptitude, and ineffectiveness,” Rehberg, a Billings rancher, said.  “The ESA has not only failed to deliver on its promises, it may actually be responsible for hastening the demise of some of the threatened species it purports to protect.”

Landowners have long complained that ESA has helped create an adversarial relationship between government regulators and private property owners, on whose lands 90% of endangered species in the U.S. have habitat.  Reverse incentives in the law have encouraged some to destroy species habitat in an effort to avoid the regulatory liability that accompanies the discovery of an endangered species on private property

"We call it the law of unintended consequences. ESA was well intentioned, but poorly enacted,” Rehberg, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said.  “Over the years, the unintended consequences that have accompanied each discovery of an endangered species have forced families, farmers, and ranchers to forfeit their land or business or both, with no recompense."

According to data compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, less than one percent of the roughly 1300 species listed have recovered since ESA was first enacted more than 30 years ago. Only six percent of all listed species are classified as “improving."  TESRA fixes the law’s long-outstanding problems by:

·        focusing on species recovery

·        providing incentives

·        increasing openness and accountability

·        strengthening scientific standards

·        creating bigger roles for state and local governments

·        protecting private property owners, and

·        eliminating dysfunctional critical habitat designations