After retirements, Trump cuts, grizzly experts torn on federal bear research's future

Federal budget cuts likely will impact grizzly study team operations.

JACKSON — Grizzly bear managers are divided on whether the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce and environmental research spell disaster for grizzly bear monitoring.

For the past month, rumors have swirled over the future of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a collaborative effort between the feds and the states housed within the U.S. Geological Survey.

Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the Trump administration, suggests abolishing the Biological Resources Division of the agency. In March, Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, where the study team resides, popped up on lists of buildings targeted for “disposal” by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The retirement in March of the team’s longtime leader, Frank van Manen, was, for some, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“You’ve got decades of experience and knowledge [leaving],” said Chris Servheen, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s former grizzly bear recovery coordinator. “And under normal circumstances, those people are replaced.”

At a meeting of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s Yellowstone subgroup last week, Matt Gould, the new leader of the bear study team, sought to dispel rumors that van Manen’s departure was connected to the Trump administration’s shakedown of the federal government.

“We have had some changes to personnel,” Gould said. “We had been anticipating that change in capacity for the past year or two.”

Van Manen will be staying on as a scientist emeritus, as will Mark Haroldson, another bigwig of the grizzly world who retired prior to Trump taking office.

Gould painted a rosier picture than had been circulating prior to the meeting.

“Our role is to serve as the coordinating agency for the study team. We are not the study team,” Gould said.

The team includes officials from the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state wildlife managers from Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

The interdependent relationships between the federal government and state agencies have enabled researchers to pool limited resources to monitor bears for the last 50 years, Gould said. “And to produce some pretty remarkable science along the way,” he added.

Pre-Trump constraints

Grizzly bear research never has been lavished with federal money. With a flatlining budget and costs on the rise due to inflation in recent years, the team was already identifying ways to trim costs, according to Dan Thompson, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s large carnivore supervisor.

“We’ve actually already tried to create efficiencies and downsize what we’ve been doing as a larger group for years now, just due to standard budgetary issues,” he said.

This has included reducing the number of flight surveys and changing the types of collars used to maximize the amount of data collected. Montana had picked up a couple of monitoring flights already, said Ken McDonald, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ head wildlife administrator.

The study team may have to look for more ways to divvy up responsibilities and prioritize what’s most essential to its mission going forward, McDonald said. An example would be conducting whitebark pine surveys biannually instead of annually.

“We’re pretty certain it’s going to be different,” McDonald said. “It’s probably going to get scaled back. That doesn’t mean it’s all or nothing.”

Servheen has been unabashed in his fears about the future of grizzly bear monitoring.

“This is not a time for any sense of peace,” he said.

He’s worried about the potential lack of monitoring in the face of increasing stresses on bears, including recreation, development on private land, land management agencies being hollowed out, climate change and fears about changes to the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act.

“So it’s the perfect storm and a disaster in the making for grizzly bears,” he said. “And then you take away the research and the science team, and you hollow them out, and we won’t even know how grizzly bears are going to respond to all these new challenges.”

Thompson recognized that there are unknowns ahead, but he’s optimistic about the future.

“I’m not trying to downplay that a lot of good people have left and things have happened,” he said. “But everybody’s got to take a collective breath.”

On the continuum of panic about the future of grizzly research, “Put me right smack in the middle,” McDonald said.

Federal monitoring

U.S. Geological Survey researchers estimate the grizzly population and study cub production, cub survival, age of first reproduction, adult female survival, food habits and intervals between litters. Though the states could pick up additional flights to help the team out, much of its work could not be undertaken by state biologists, Servheen said.

“The states are well intentioned, but they can’t replace the study team,” he said. “They don’t have the experience or the knowledge, nor do they have the personnel or the money to do it.”

The federal researchers are responsible for the “analytical piece” of monitoring, notably developing and running the population model, McDonald said.

s a real kind of specialized capacity that they have that, at least right now, we don’t have the capacity to do that,” he said. “It would take some revamping and reprioritizing if we were going to do that.”

Wyoming Game and Fish has gotten more involved with data management and data analysis over the last few years. “We have some personnel that are extremely talented at that on our end, too,” Thompson said.

Proposed budget cuts

Just two days after the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem bear meeting, the Trump administration released a draft budget proposing more than a half-billion dollars in cuts to the research arm of the U.S. Geological Survey. Though the budget is ultimately up to Congress to decide, Servheen said he and others have been contacting their representatives about their concerns and haven’t heard a word.

“There’s no evidence that they’re at all supportive or sympathetic to this,” he said. “I wish they were.”

Trump’s budget request “makes it clear that he’s serious about cutting wasteful Washington spending,” said Laura Mengelkamp, a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming.

“It’s too early to tell if these cuts will have a direct impact on federal grizzly bear research,” she said, adding that Barrasso believes the science has proven that the grizzly bear is fully recovered.

U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, echoed in an emailed statement that the science supports delisting. She didn’t debate the value of the federal research program.

“We are nearly $37 trillion in debt, and that means some worthwhile programs won’t continue to be funded,” she said. “Congress has irresponsibly stewarded taxpayer dollars for the past 20 years, and these are the consequences.”

This story was published on May 7, 2025.