The Fish and Wildlife Service decided today to revise seven decisions on protecting species across the country after having concluded that a Bush administration appointee may have had an improper influence on its rulings on whether to protect imperiled species under the Endangered Species Act.

The Interior Department political appointee Julie MacDonald resigned from the department in May amid charges of improper meddling in scientific decisions, but it was only on November 23, that Ken Stansell of the Fish and Wildlife Service sent a letter to House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall saying that the agency spent the last four months reviewing eight Endangered Species Act decisions made under Julie MacDonald and that it decided to revise seven of them. According to the new decisions that the Fish and Wildlife Service is likely to take, California’s arroyo toad and red-legged frog could regain protection that federal biologists concluded was crucial to their survival.

Although former Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Julie MacDonald was a civil engineer and she had no formal training in natural sciences, she used to question and sometimes even overruled recommendations by biologists and other field staffers. According to Nick Rahall, Julie MacDonald “should never have been allowed near the endangered species program.”

Referring to Ken Stansell’s letter, Rahall also added that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “announcement is the latest illustration of the depth of incompetence at the highest levels of management within the Interior Department and breadth of this administration's penchant for torpedoing science."

Jamie Rappaport Clark, head of the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Clinton, confirmed that MacDonald’s approach was wrong, as political appointees are not supposed to pressure subordinates that are career scientists to change their findings. "In my 20 years of government service . . . I've never seen anything like it," said Rappaport.