National Wildlife Refuges Victim of Budget Shortfalls

Havens for fish, wildlife, hunters and anglers, national wildlife refuges suffer from chronic underfunding. How do we fix it?

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees operate an airboat at Bayou Sauvage NWR. Funding shortfalls mean reduced staff to carry out the vital mission of the refuge system. Photo: Ian Shive/USFWS

The National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) is crumbling under the pressures of expanding demands, growing responsibilities, and a shrinking pool of resources. As these landscapes continue to change, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) capacity to manage wildlife habitat, address visitor concerns, provide necessary infrastructure, and enforce the law in these places is in decline. 

Unfortunately, the NWRS has begun to fall into disrepair due to severe staffing shortages and chronic underfunding. From FY2010 to FY2024, the NWRS lost more than 800 classified staff positions, reducing its workforce by nearly 30 percent. Meanwhile, discretionary funding has remained flat, and the purchasing power of those dollars has been drastically reduced by growing inflation. The FWS discretionary budget saw a four percent cut in nominal dollars between FY2023 and FY2024, with further reductions likely in FY2025. 

Many refuges are operating entirely without staff, significantly limiting their ability to manage habitats, enforce regulations, and serve visitors, including hunters. On Nevada’s 1.6-million-acre Desert National Wildlife Refuge—the largest refuge in the lower 48 and a cradle of desert bighorn sheep conservation—only three employees oversee all operations. Similarly, at the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, which serves 100,000 visitors each year, staff has dropped from 30 full-time employees to just seven, significantly hampering invasive species control efforts that are key to Everglades restoration. Other refuges report reducing or modifying their managed hunting programs because of this lack of capacity. Law enforcement staff are spread dangerously thin, with some refuges lacking any officers and others with only one to monitor all federal wildlife violations. 

While improving operational efficiencies can surely address some issues, more staff and more funding will be essential to ensure that the NWRS can deliver on its mission to “administer a national network of lands and waters for the conservation, management and, where appropriate, restoration of the fish, wildlife and plant resources and their habitats within the United States for the benefit of present and future generations of Americans.”

Without increased financial support, essential projects will stall, visitor centers will continue to close, and invasive species will proliferate.

The National Park Service receives $34 per land acre and has one staff member for every 4,200 acres to manage their system. In contrast, the NWRS operates with just $5.55 per land acre and only one staff member for every 39,191 acres.

What is the National Wildlife Refuge System? 

The NWRS is one of the world's largest systems of conservation lands, covering more than 95 million acres and maintaining wildlife habitat across 571 units in all 50 states. It was established in 1903 by President (and Boone and Crockett Club co-founder) Theodore Roosevelt and is the only system of public land management in this country managed specifically for fish and wildlife. 

According to FWS, the NWRS helps to conserve some of the country’s most iconic ecosystems, as well as a diverse array of fish and wildlife populations that rely on them. The NWRS includes ecoregions ranging from the prairies and grasslands of the Great Plains and the hardwood forests of the Southeast to desert Southwestern landscapes and wetlands oases. The system also includes critical ecosystems along rivers, streams, wetlands, coasts, and marine areas. The lands and waters managed as part of the NWRS provide critical ecosystem services like water filtration, carbon sequestration, and flood mitigation that benefit communities and wildlife alike.

Further, over 67 million people visit national wildlife refuges annually, generating $3.2 billion in economic activity and supporting more than 41,000 jobs. The hunting, fishing, and wildlife watching on these refuge lands help maintain robust rural economies. 

However, without adequate funding and resource management planning, none of this can happen, and the results of chronic underfunding and understaffing are already evident.  

How Did We Get Here? 

Funding a federal agency is no easy task, and it’s further complicated because all three branches of government often have different ideas about what that agency should be doing and how they should be doing it. Programs are built, and plans are sometimes made without adequately accounting for the resources necessary to execute these plans or maintain significant infrastructure in the long term. However, this problem comes down to some very basic math.

Visitation to the NWRS has increased 38 percent over the last 13 years, and the system itself has expanded by two million new acres of land and water. However, the budget for the entire NWRS has only increased by three percent in nominal dollars over that time. Inflation has completely outpaced that marginal increase, which leaves the natural resource professionals charged with managing the NWRS without the resources necessary to restore, manage, and conserve wildlife habitat. 

Further, rising fixed costs like federal wage increases consume a significant portion of the NWRS budget, leaving little for adding new positions or procuring necessary equipment. As a result, some refuges lack the staff needed to open gates and meet visitors, much less conduct wildlife monitoring or maintain infrastructure. New programs and shifting priorities across the FWS have also contributed to this decline. 

By 2020, as Congress began considering a bill that would become the Great American Outdoors Act—legislation that was originally intended to only address deferred maintenance in our National Parks System—the FWS had identified a deferred maintenance backlog of $1.4 billion on the NWRS. As a direct result of the Club’s advocacy efforts, Congressional leaders expanded that legislation to address deferred maintenance on the NWRS. However, whether those funds were successfully deployed four years later is unclear. 

The problems on refuges extend far beyond just deferred maintenance. The issue of baseline staff capacity becomes especially clear when comparing the NWRS to other federal land management agencies. For example, refuges and the National Park System both play important roles in conserving America’s natural heritage. And they consist of relatively similar land holdings—95 million acres and 85 million acres, respectively. However, the National Park Service receives $34 per land acre and has one staff member for every 4,200 acres to manage their system. In contrast, the NWRS operates with just $5.55 per land acre and only one staff member for every 39,191 acres. The NWRS funding drops even further to only 62 cents/acre when accounting for water acreage.

Where Do We Go From Here? 

The NWRS is at an inflection point. Chronic underfunding and severe staffing shortages threaten to further undermine its ability to conserve wildlife populations, provide recreational opportunities, and serve as a model for conservation. At the same time, rules and regulations prevent the FWS from advancing the mission of the NWRS. However, there is hope for improvement. 

Organizations like Boone and Crockett are actively working with Congress to advocate for increased appropriations to fund the NWRS, emphasizing the need to restore staffing levels and address the maintenance backlog. This will require an extraordinary amount of effort from across the American Wildlife Conservation Partners to not only better tell the story of the NWRS in the halls of Congress but also to identify innovative solutions to the problems that the FWS is facing in managing the 95 million acres under its care. 

Recently, Congress has explored the idea of expanding contract stewardship authorities to the NWRS. These private-public partnerships would allow NGO partners to assist the FWS in completing the work of habitat restoration, management, and wildlife conservation, if not also assisting with managed hunting programs, taking administrative and staffing burdens off the shoulders of the FWS. Similar programs have been instituted with great success on lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. 

Similarly, with the Great American Outdoors Act set to expire in 2025, Congress will have an opportunity to change the rules and regulations for how the agencies address their deferred maintenance backlog if this legislation is renewed. Importantly, it must be made clear that deferred habitat maintenance should be considered on an even plane with, if not more important than, deferred visitor infrastructure. 

By investing in the NWRS, expanding public-private partnerships, and ensuring that management policies reflect both ecological needs and community interests, we can secure the future of these vital public lands. The legacy of the NWRS—and the wildlife and people it supports—depends on what we, and our nation’s leaders in Washington, D.C., decide to do today, tomorrow, and in the years to come. As the founders of the NWRS, it is our collective responsibility as members of the Boone and Crockett Club—and as hunters and anglers—to steward these public lands for future generations.