Policy

What the October 2026 USFWS grant overhaul means for state wildlife

Updated 18 October 2026

An interim final rule published at 91 FR 88421 on 9 October 2026, signed by Service Director Martha E. Williams and captioned "Revisions to the State Wildlife Grants Programme Formula and Match Schedule," retunes the way the United States Fish and Wildlife Service distributes the roughly 70 million dollars it sends to state fish and wildlife agencies each year. The rewrite trims the base component, lifts the competitive component, attaches a four-tier performance ladder to a share of the award, and phases in a sliding match that the Service says is meant to reward the states that have actually delivered on State Wildlife Action Plan priorities. States have until 8 December 2026 to comment on the formula change, and the first awards under the new structure will be made in fiscal year 2028.

What the rule actually changes inside the SWG formula

The State Wildlife Grants programme, set out at 50 CFR Part 80 and reauthorised most recently in the America the Beautiful Freshwater Act of 2024, has run on the same two-track architecture since 2001. A base allocation, set by a statutory formula, gives every state and territory a minimum share of the pot. A competitive allocation, drawn from what is left, lets states bid against each other for Species of Greatest Conservation Need work. The two tracks have always had a 70/30 balance in spirit, and that is the first thing the new rule disturbs.

Under the interim final rule the base share drops from 70 percent of the appropriation to 60 percent, and the competitive share rises from 30 to 40. The four performance tiers, labelled Tier One through Tier Four, then attach to half of the competitive pool. Tier One, the floor, requires a state to have submitted an Action Plan update within the previous eight years and to have closed 25 percent of its highest-ranked threats. Tier Two, the new middle band, requires 40 percent closure of high-ranked threats and a published list of recovery deliverables. Tier Three requires 60 percent closure plus matching expenditure from non-federal partners. Tier Four, the new top band, requires 80 percent closure, a non-federal match of at least 35 percent, and a published monitoring protocol that meets Service standards. A state that drops out of Tier Two loses access to the upper half of the competitive pool; a state that fails Tier One for two consecutive cycles is moved to a remediation track and must write a corrective Action Plan before further SWG funds are released.

The match schedule, formerly a flat one-to-one federal-to-state ratio, becomes a sliding scale: 25 percent state match for Tier One, 30 percent for Tier Two, 35 percent for Tier Three, and 40 percent for Tier Four. The Service frames the slide as a recognition that the higher tiers are doing more of the recovery work that the federal government is supposed to be paying for. State agencies that have lived through the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration programme's 75/25 split, set in the Dingell-Johnson and Pittman-Robertson frameworks, will recognise the structure. What they will not recognise is the speed. Awards for fiscal year 2027 will be run under the old formula because the money has already been apportioned. Awards for fiscal year 2028 will be the first under the new formula, and state agencies have to tell the Service which tier they intend to claim by 1 May 2027.

Why the rewrite was framed around outcomes rather than needs

The Service's own preamble, at 91 FR 88421, is unusually candid about the reason for the change. The 2024 Government Accountability Office report on SWG, GAO-24-106, found that, of the 12,567 funded projects between 2009 and 2022, fewer than 22 percent had been evaluated against a published outcome metric. The same report noted that base allocations had been governed since 2001 by a formula that reflects land area and population rather than conservation status. Williams's signed statement in the rule reads, in the part the Service lifted into the Federal Register preamble, that the formula as it stands "rewards geography and demography rather than delivery" and that the rewrite is meant to change that.

The Service has not been the only voice. In August 2026 the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the umbrella body that represents the 50 state agencies, told the Service in a written consultation that any tier system should be piloted for at least two award cycles before full implementation. The Service declined to do that, and the interim final rule is explicit that there will be no pilot. States that want a longer runway are pointed to the 60-day comment window and the appeals process set out in 50 CFR 80.14, but the appeals route only covers individual tier determinations, not the structure of the tiers themselves.

What the rewrite will mean for the next State Wildlife Action Plan round

State Wildlife Action Plans are themselves up for review in 2027. Every state must submit a refreshed plan under the eight-year cycle, and the new rule is written so that the tier a state can claim in 2028 depends on the actions recorded in the 2027 plan. The Service's guidance, filed as Appendix C to the rule, sets out a list of "closeable threats" that the Service will treat as Tier Two or above for grading purposes. The list includes, among other items, a written recovery framework for a federally listed species, a completed habitat management plan for a Species of Greatest Conservation Need, a working population viability analysis for a species that has been proposed for listing, and a published response to an emerging threat such as white-nose syndrome in bats, snake fungal disease, or avian influenza in wild waterfowl.

The plan evaluation will, in effect, become a graded instrument rather than a written one. The Service's intent, as explained in the rule's preamble, is to use the next Action Plan round to make the tier system genuinely consequential. A state that delivers a thoughtful plan but scores Tier One on the closeable threats list will receive 60 percent of the base plus 60 percent of the competitive pool, with the balance re-pooled. A state that scores Tier Four will receive 60 percent of the base plus the full competitive pool and the upper half of the performance bonus. The Service has estimated, in the regulatory impact analysis, that the difference between a Tier One outcome and a Tier Four outcome for a mid-sized state will be 4.7 million dollars a year by fiscal year 2030.

What this means for the species on the IUCN Red List and the U.S. list

The funding question is a species question. The Action Plan round that the new formula grades is the same round that drives recovery work for the species of greatest conservation need, which the Service has used as a proxy for the species most at risk of needing federal listing. Of the 1,654 species currently listed as threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, just over 60 percent are covered by recovery frameworks that depend at least in part on SWG money. For the larger group, the 12,000-plus Species of Greatest Conservation Need that the Service and the state agencies use as the working list, the dependence is closer to 90 percent.

The rule itself does not change any species' status. The Service is careful, in the preamble, to say that the rewrite of the SWG formula is not intended to affect any listing determination. The link is in the field rather than the file. A state that loses a tier in 2028 will probably have to slow down a habitat acquisition, push a population monitoring programme back by a season, or postpone the next phase of a species recovery plan. A state that gains a tier can do the opposite. The rule thus joins the October 2026 FEMA relocation rule on listed mussels and the October 2026 IUCN Red List update as one of three Service-level instruments that have, in the same fortnight, reshaped the operating environment for the recovery community.

What the rewrite does not change, and what the comment window is for

There are limits to what the rule does. The Service did not rewrite the base formula itself. The land-area and population factors still govern how the 60 percent base share is split. The Service did not touch the statutory minimum, set at the equivalent of one percent of the appropriation, that has always protected the smallest territories. The Service did not change the cost-share rates for territories, and the rule preserves the existing waiver process for states that have suffered a presidentially declared disaster since the start of the fiscal year.

What the comment window is for, in the Service's own framing, is the scoring rubric inside Appendix C. The Service has asked for comment on the list of closeable threats, on the evidence it will accept as proof of threat closure, and on the timing of the corrective Action Plan requirement. Comments are to be filed at the federal eRulemaking portal under docket number FWS-HQ-NWRS-2026-0091, and the Service has scheduled a single public listening session for 4 November 2026 in Falls Church, Virginia. The Service has also said that it will consider, but not necessarily accept, requests for a pilot programme for one or two award cycles; the request has to come from the state agency rather than from a partner or a third party.

What states are doing in the meantime

At least twelve state fish and wildlife agencies have already said, in briefings to their wildlife commissions, that they will file comments asking the Service to delay the tier system for at least one cycle. The same agencies have, separately, begun to score themselves against the closeable threats list in Appendix C. The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies has set up a working group, chaired by the director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, to compare scores across states and to argue, in the comment, that the rubric undercounts work that is hard to score on the closeable threats list. A coalition of twelve nongovernmental organisations, led by the National Wildlife Federation and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, has filed an early comment that supports the outcome orientation of the rule but asks the Service to add a Tier Zero for the smallest states, set at 0.5 percent of the appropriation.

The Service has signalled, in the preamble, that it will accept comments on the Tier Zero idea and on the pilot programme request. It has not signalled that it will revisit the 60/40 base/competitive split or the four-tier structure. The next milestone in the rule is the publication of the first tier scores, which is expected in November 2027. Between now and then, state agencies have roughly thirteen months to build the evidence that will decide how much of the 70 million dollars they will actually see in fiscal year 2028.