P@triot
Diamond Member
This is what happens when the federal government steps outside of its constitutional authority. Waste. Fraud. Abuse. Ineptitude. Corruption.
This ‘Endangered Species’ Story Was Government-Sponsored Fake News
So it took them 30 years and $670,000 of tax payers money for them to acknowledge they were "fixing" a problem that never existed.The reason it was not more publicized is probably because the whole thing is a farce. The species did not recover—it never was endangered in the first place. When the Fish and Wildlife Service added this plant to the endangered species list in 1984, the agency reported it could only find about 1,000 of them in a few southern Texas counties, and that there was concern about “grazing pressure” on the hapless plant.
But surveys conducted after 1984 found a wealth of Johnston’s frankenia—over 4 million by one account and over 9 million by another—enough that biologists probably quit trying to guess.
The Fish and Wildlife Service hailed the “recovery” of the plant, saying, “The threats to this species have been eliminated or reduced to the point that the species has recovered … ”
That sounds a lot like a doctor claiming his patient is cured after realizing a terminal diagnosis was totally wrong.
This ‘Endangered Species’ Story Was Government-Sponsored Fake News