16. Department of the Interior · Notable
Delist the gray wolf in the lower 48 states
Printed page 534 16. Department of the Interior
“Delist the gray wolf in the lower 48 states in light of its full recovery under the ESA.”
What has happened
- Attempted
The President directed the delisting process to start. Section 3 of Executive Order 14425, Supporting America's Ranchers, gives the Secretary of the Interior 90 days to determine whether the gray wolf and the Mexican wolf have met the Endangered Species Act recovery criteria for delisting or downlisting and, if so, to "begin the process of delisting or downlisting them"; to send the President a legislative recommendation to fully delist or downlist both; and to consider revising the criteria for authorizing lethal removal. A directive to determine and, conditionally, to begin is attempted: no finding has been made and no proposed rule has been published. The Mexican wolf is a separately listed entity and outside this Quote.
- Not started
No rule delisting the gray wolf in the lower 48 States has been proposed or issued. Greps of every Federal Register rule, proposed rule and notice in the window return one gray-wolf document, the Fish and Wildlife Service's request for information of 2026-04-06 on how Colorado is implementing the 2023 section 10(j) nonessential experimental population rule; it is about depredation, compensation and state implementation, not about listing status. Interior's 2025–2026 press releases contain no wolf announcement, and no wolf bill has passed either chamber of the 119th Congress.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Nothing has been proposed. The only gray-wolf action in the window is a request for information about Colorado’s reintroduced population.
Checked against the full 2026 Unified Agenda on reginfo.gov (Interior, agencyCd 1000, active stages, read 2026-09-01; agenda published in the Federal Register 2026-08-14). None of the 201 active Interior entries — 128 of them the Fish and Wildlife Service’s — names the gray wolf, at any stage. The negative now reaches the agency’s stated intentions as well as its published rulemaking.
- 2026-09-04 (reviewed 2026-09-06): the order was signed 2026-09-04 and had not been published in the Federal Register by 2026-09-06. The 90-day determination falls due 2026-12-03. Our automated matching did not pair the order with this item — the order never says “delist the gray wolf in the lower 48” — it was found by reading the two new presidential actions in full.
- 2026-09-10 (reviewed): published as Executive Order 14425, 91 FR 57765 (FR 2026-18571), and added to the 2026-09-04 event as its Federal Register citation. The Federal Register record’s title, number and signing date match the whitehouse.gov text read on 2026-09-06, and we opened the Federal Register text on 2026-09-11 and found section 3 as quoted above.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- Endangered Species Act listing of the gray wolf
- ID
- 1505