Alaska, like other states around the nation, is compiling a 10-year plan to guide conservation of sometimes vulnerable wildlife populations. Alaska’s State Wildlife Action Plan, which is in draft form, identifies “species of greatest conservation need” because of declining populations, changing habitat, development, invasive species threats, knowledge gaps or other concerns.
But now the federal funding that supports Alaska’s State Wildlife Action Plan and those of other states is itself vulnerable.
The Trump administration proposes to zero out funding for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s entire State and Tribal Wildlife Grant Program, established in 2000. The program distributes money to states to use on conservation projects that are designed in accordance with wildlife action plans. For Alaska, the most recent grant funding was about $2.76 million.
In its Fish and Wildlife Service budget summary, the Trump administration pitched elimination of the grant funding as part of a shift to the private sector.
“Although FWS is responsible for conserving trust resources across broad landscapes, its work to conserve natural resources is impossible without partnerships with States, Tribes, and private landowners. In recognition of this, the 2026 Budget will eliminate grants to States and Tribes that come with strings attached on the types of species they should conserve. These eliminations will be complemented by FWS investments in partnerships with private landowners,” the summary said.
The summary does not identify the “strings” that the administration contends limit states’ actions.
While Alaska and other states must have 10-year wildlife action plans to qualify for the federal grants, the states choose how those grants will be distributed, said an official with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Wildlife Conservation.
State Wildlife Grants “are implemented at the discretion of the states,” said Lindsey Nietmann in an email. She is the coordinator of the division’s threatened, endangered and diversity program.
A key goal of the plan in Alaska and those in other states is to address possible wildlife problems before they get serious enough to warrant the drastic step of Endangered Species Act listing, said state biologist Julie Hagelin.
“An important general principle is that it’s more cost effective to maintain or manage or mitigate threats to ensure sustainable populations of wildlife, sort of in a proactive way, rather than the need to go to great lengths and expense and sort of have prescriptive regulatory burdens that the federal government imposes through the ESA,” said Hagelin, a conservation and management coordinator with the Division of Wildlife Conservation.
The concept fits Alaska’s constitutional mandate for sustained yield and is “consistent with this idea of being proactive and caring for the long-term sustainability of our natural and wildlife,” Hagelin said.
A variety of work to mitigate threats has been funded by the federal grants. Recent projects include research into Alaska bats and the dangers they may be facing from white-nosed syndrome, a fungal disease that has killed large numbers of Lower 48 bats; monitoring of the Aleutian tern, a migratory bird that breeds only in coastal Alaska and neighboring parts of Siberia and is believed to be declining in population; and studies of forest practices that are best for regeneration and protection of habitat used by bird and mammal species.
The State Wildlife Grant Program appears to be popular nationally.
“This program provides critical funding to every U.S. state and territory to plan and implement proactive conservation actions to prevent the nation’s fish and wildlife from becoming endangered,” the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department says on its website. “The State and Tribal Wildlife Grants program is considered the core program for keeping species healthy and off the federal threatened and endangered species list, a goal shared by a broad constituency of conservationists, business, farmers, ranchers, and land developers.”
“The State Wildlife Grants program has allowed the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and its partners to accomplish so much more for Iowa’s Natural Resources than was possible before its inception,” the Iowa Department of Natural Resources website says. “State Wildlife Grants is the nation’s most important program in keeping species from becoming endangered.”
“State Wildlife Grants save taxpayers millions of dollars,” the Georgia Department of Natural Resources website says. “Taking action to conserve wildlife before it becomes endangered is environmentally sound and fiscally responsible. Once a species drops to the point of potential extinction, recovery efforts become risky and expensive. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Even the first Trump administration lauded the program. In 2020, the final year of the first Trump administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service released a publication that touted it as providing “20 years of conservation success.”
However, the first Trump administration attempted that year to slash funding for the program by more than $20 million, though not eliminate it. Congress wound up appropriating about the same amount in that budget as had been appropriated in other recent years.
The wildlife grants continue to enjoy bipartisan support in Congress, if a recent letter signed by 42 U.S. senators is any indication.
Alaska bats, belugas, hares among the project subjectsThe federal grant program distributed about $55 million in total to states to be used at their discretion for work this year. Alaska, California and Texas received equal amounts and were the top recipients. That has been the case every year since 2002, with annual amounts that ranged from about $2.3 million to over $3.8 million.
Related Fish and Wildlife Service grants are awarded to tribal governments across the nation. That tribal grant program distributed about $6 million for projects this year. In Alaska, tribal governments have used grants from that program for projects that include fish surveys in Southeast Alaska to clam restoration work in Prince William Sound to habitat surveys in Seward Peninsula areas that might be affected by mine development.
Another related program provides grants on a competitive basis totaling about $7 million a year. One recent Alaska project that won a competitive grant concerned research into the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale population.
If the grants survive, a wide range of Alaska species could benefit.
Alaska’s new wildlife action plan, in draft form, identifies 362 vertebrates as being of “greatest conservation need,” a number that includes 188 bird species, 101 fish species, 43 terrestrial mammals, 25 marine mammals and five amphibians. That is far fewer than the approximately 20 Alaska populations with Endangered Species Act protection.
One species identified as being of greatest conservation need is the Alaska hare, sometimes called the tundra hare. It is known for its large size – up to 15 pounds, much larger than the more abundant snowshoe hare – but a lot of other details about the population remain unknown.
There are historical accounts from biologists and local hunters who described seeing groups of hundreds of Alaska hares, Hagelin said. “And now it’s pretty rare to find groups of more than three to four individuals,” she said. Aside from those indicators of decline, wildlife managers are faced with a scarcity of information about Alaska hares in general, including their population status and habitat use, she said. “It’s all kind of poorly understood.”
Recent research that was funded in part by the federal grant program enabled biologists to engage in some “epic snowmachine surveys” in which they gathered hare pellets and tagged some animals to piece together genetic and population information, Hagelin said. Information from that work helped lead to some hunting restrictions imposed by the state Board of Game and Federal Subsistence Board, she said.
Another species identified as being among those of “greatest conservation need” is the gray-headed chickadee, previously known as the Siberian tit. Their range extends across the circumpolar north, from Siberia to northern Asia to North America, but the Alaska population appears to have declined.
For the most part, the list of species in the draft 2025 State Wildlife Action Plan is the same as that in the 2015 plan. There are 37 more identified in the new plan, largely because of habitat changes that have affected aquatic species.
An important new element is a more precise methodology for selecting species of greatest conservation need, Hagelin said. That uses a ranking system developed by the Alaska Center for Conservation Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
In addition to guiding federally funded projects, the State Wildlife Action Plan helps Alaska coordinate management actions with other states, Hagelin said. That is important to protecting migratory birds that spend the summer breeding seasons in the Arctic or subarctic, where habitats are more likely to be intact, but spend other parts of the year in southern habitats that may be more compromised, she said.
Generally, the plan does not apply to game species that are widely hunted, such as caribou, because there are numerous other programs and revenue sources that provide money used for management and conservation, she said.
Likewise, it does not concentrate much on fish that are the subject of big commercial or sport harvests, as those fisheries have their own management and funding systems. And it does not include plants, though other states’ plans do extend to plant species. Texas is among the states that includes plants in its wildlife action plan, and it has a total of about 1,200 identified species of greatest conservation need, Hagelin said.
The State and Tribal Wildlife Grant Program is among several Fish and Wildlife Service-managed programs that the Trump administration has targeted for funding elimination.
The administration’s budget proposes no money for the National Wildlife Refuge Fund, the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, the North American Wetlands Conservation Fund, the Multinational Species Conservation Fund and the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Fund. Each of those funds got between $5 million and $49 million in funding for the current fiscal year.