Who Pays the Conservation Bills in the United States?
The Take home Message
- The conservation community in the United States is sprawling and complex, and funding comes from a wide diversity of sources.
- Hunters and anglers tend to take pride in the money they put toward conservation, and hunting- and fishing-interest groups often tout the contribution of hunters and anglers in conservation. This has skewed the perception of conservation funding in the United States.
- While dollars from hunters and anglers are vital to conservation in the US, several taxpayer-supported funding streams dwarf the dollars contributed by hunter and anglers.
The Full Story
Conservation and management of natural resources in the United States is expensive. Really, really expensive. There are many mechanisms used to fund conservation, and while most of us probably don’t think too much about them, one group does: hunters. Hunters, and the interest-groups associated with hunting, have integrated the self-described role as funders of conservation into the fabric of what it means to be a hunter in this country. If you’ve watched a hunting show or read a hunting magazine, you’re probably aware of the argument that hunters and anglers (sportspeople) pay huge sums of money into the conservation system each year. Groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Pheasants Forever heavily advertise the fact that many state agencies rely on such a sportspeople-pay model to operate. Even politicians from rural states champion the sportspeople-pay model.
This is a topic of particular interest to me because I’m both an obsessive hunter and a PhD-level ecologist. In my free time, I can be found in a tree stand or traveling the country hunting birds over my dog Klaas. In my professional life, I work with funding agencies to conduct conservation research and I teach university classes where we cover the basics of conservation and management, including who funds it. That means I have spent more time than most researching and thinking about how the dollars I spend on hunting licenses affect conservation and management of our natural resources. Right up front, I should state that I strongly agree with the sentiment that sportspeople are an important source of funding for conservation and management of natural resources in the United States. They’re just not as important as is often portrayed in the media and by hunting and fishing groups.
This is a topic of particular interest to me because I’m both an obsessive hunter and a PhD-level ecologist. In my free time, I can be found in a tree stand or traveling the country hunting birds over my dog Klaas. In my professional life, I work with funding agencies to conduct conservation research and I teach university classes where we cover the basics of conservation and management, including who funds it. That means I have spent more time than most researching and thinking about how the dollars I spend on hunting licenses affect conservation and management of our natural resources. Right up front, I should state that I strongly agree with the sentiment that sportspeople are an important source of funding for conservation and management of natural resources in the United States. They’re just not as important as is often portrayed in the media and by hunting and fishing groups.
Taken alone, the monetary inputs from sportspeople into the conservation system are impressive. However, if you pay attention to these arguments, you’ll notice they are always missing the same thing: context. I’ll provide that context, but first, it’s important to understand how hunters (and anglers) help fund conservation and management. Many non-hunters are surprised to hear that the act of killing an animal helps pay for conservation and management. It does, through several mechanisms.
First, sportspeople buy hunting and fishing licenses and permits from state management agencies, who then spend that money to implement programs that benefit wildlife. Texas brings in over $100 million annually from the sale of licenses and permits. Michigan brings in $75 million. $33 million in Missouri. All told, hunters and anglers spend more than $800 million each year on licenses and permits. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) similarly collects revenue from the sale of Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamps, which you may know by their colloquial name: Federal Duck Stamps. Each year, the federal government sells around 1.5 million duck stamps at $25 each to hunters and collectors. All but about fifty cents of that goes to the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, which is used to purchase and lease land for the National Wildlife Refuge System.
In addition to licenses and permits, sportspeople spend huge sums of money on hunting equipment. These purchases pump billions of dollars into the economy, but more importantly for conservation, they include an excise tax collected by the federal government. Guns, ammo, and archery equipment are taxed as prescribed by the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, better known as the Pittman-Robertson Act (P-R). The funds collected with these taxes are allocated back to state management agencies, which use the money to implement programs that benefit wildlife.
The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 created one of the main funding streams for most state fish and wildlife agencies. The revenue brought in by Pittman-Robertson remained relatively low for about the first 40 years, before rapidly increasing beginning in the 1980s. A spike in sales of sporting rifles, handguns, and ammo during the Obama administration drove an influx of Pittman-Robertson dollars that has not subsided during the Trump administration.
Pittman-Robertson represents a landmark moment in wildlife conservation and management in the United States. The idea of P-R is simple: an 11% tax is levied on the sale of long guns, ammo, and archery equipment, and a 10% tax is levied on the sale of ammo. By the early 1980s, P-R revenues consistently topped $100 million each year. In the late 1990s, the revenues were near $200 million. However, the real growth in P-R funds has occurred over the last decade. Large increases in sales of ammunition, long guns, and pistols since the beginning of the Obama administration have driven a spike in P-R funds distributed to states, although in truth, most of this spike is likely related to sales of guns and ammunition intended for self-defense and rarely used for hunting. Each year since 2014, the USFWS has distributed more than $600 million to state agencies, maxing out at over $800 million in fiscal year 2015. All told, the P-R Act has directed over $12 billion into the coffers of state wildlife management agencies who have matched it at 25%, or $3 billion, mostly from license and permit sales. After accounting for inflation, the lifetime value of the federal portion of P-R was nearing $19 billion by 2019. The idea was so successful it was copied almost exactly for the Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act of 1950 (usually called the Dingell-Johnson Act), which places an excise tax on fishing equipment and motorboat fuel.
As I said, these numbers alone are quite impressive, but big numbers with no context can be horribly misleading. How does the $800 million in revenue generated by Pittman-Robertson compare to other sources of funding for the conservation community? How about the $350 million from the Dingell-Johnson Act? The roughly $800 million spent each year on licenses and permits? Or the $800 million raised by Duck Stamps since 1934? Not all that favorably, actually.
Revenues from oil and gas leases currently fund $300–400 million in conservation each year through the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Even better, the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020 guarantees the long-held practice of siphoning money out of the LWCF for other purposes must end, so it’s about to become even more valuable for conservation. Funds to staff and maintain wildlife refuges, national parks, and national monuments generally come through normal budgetary pathways and entrance fees. The National Park Service’s annual operating budget is over $2.5 billion and Fish and Wildlife Service’s annual operating budget is over $1 billion (not including P-R funds) so collectively those two agencies have budgets approaching twice the total amount spent by hunters and anglers on licenses and excise taxes.
There is another source of conservation funding even larger than the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service combined: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). There are two agencies within USDA that handle most of the conservation initiatives as dictated by the Farm Bill: the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Farm Service Agency. Conservation related programs in these two agencies top $5 billion each year. The funding benefits conservation through at least eight different programs in NRCS aimed at minimizing the effects of agriculture on natural ecosystems, providing funding for conservation easements, and restoring agricultural land to more natural functioning. The Farm Service Agency oversees perhaps the best known of the USDA conservation programs, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to remove land from agricultural production for 10–15 years. In just the last year, USDA has paid nearly $1.7 billion dollars to landowners with registered CRP land. This one program alone is therefore on par with the conservation funds raised by excise taxes and license and permit fees together!
What about other parts of the conservation community? Conservation research is often overlooked by the public, but it is vitally important for the future of conservation in North America and abroad. Researchers are doing the work necessary for the on-the-ground managers to implement conservation efforts. Without ecologists, wildlife biologists, and conservation biologists, management would be haphazard, undirected, and largely ineffective. Your state fish and game department does employ some biologists and funds some research with hunter-generated revenue, but that is usually a minor source of research funding and varies greatly by state. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also employ biologists and some of them fund considerable amounts of research through private donations. Private companies fund some research through business income.
Still, the most consistent funding for conservation research comes from normal budgetary processes of the federal government. Some of that research is conducted by federal biologists in USFWS and United States Geological Service (which oddly, houses most federal biologists). Some federal funds are funneled through states for research to be conducted by either state biologists or academic researchers. Finally, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which also runs on tax dollars, funds much of the “basic” research that informs conservation of the future. Collectively, spending on research relevant to conservation runs well into the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
There are other, mostly private sources of conservation funding that often get overlooked. NGOs get at least part of their funding from donors, but also receive funds from state and federal government agencies. There are both hunting-related NGOs and general conservation NGOs that do important work in North America and abroad, some with staggering conservation budgets. The Nature Conservancy is one of the largest NGOs in the United States, with a conservation budget of $500 million or more each year. To put it another way, this single NGO has a conservation budget nearing the revenue created annually by Pittman-Robertson, although The Nature Conservancy does work around the world as opposed to only in the United States. Smaller conservation NGOs, of which there are hundreds or thousands, fund land acquisition and protection, research, education, lobbying, and public relations. Importantly, none of these sources account for the potentially sizeable amount of time, effort, and money put into local conservation efforts by citizens and landowners.
It is probably impossible to make anything resembling a valid quantitative comparison between the value of hunting and fishing in conservation and the value of all other revenue sources. There are some pretty good examples of bad economic analyses attempting to do exactly that floating around on the internet, but I’ve never seen any attempt that should be treated with even a shred of credibility. On one hand, it would require calculating and tracking nearly a century of revenues earned through Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson excise taxes, Duck Stamps purchased by hunters, hunting and fishing licenses, donations to hunting and fishing NGOs, and money spent by private landowners to improve game habitat. On the other, you would need to calculate the value of conservation lands purchased or claimed (or stolen) through the normal functions of the country, the parts of operating budgets of conservation agencies not funded by hunters and anglers, taxpayer dollars spent on conservation, donations to the hundreds of non-hunting NGOs, the value of research to conservation, and money spent by private landowners to improve habitat for species other than game animals.
Still, the most consistent funding for conservation research comes from normal budgetary processes of the federal government. Some of that research is conducted by federal biologists in USFWS and United States Geological Service (which oddly, houses most federal biologists). Some federal funds are funneled through states for research to be conducted by either state biologists or academic researchers. Finally, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which also runs on tax dollars, funds much of the “basic” research that informs conservation of the future. Collectively, spending on research relevant to conservation runs well into the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
There are other, mostly private sources of conservation funding that often get overlooked. NGOs get at least part of their funding from donors, but also receive funds from state and federal government agencies. There are both hunting-related NGOs and general conservation NGOs that do important work in North America and abroad, some with staggering conservation budgets. The Nature Conservancy is one of the largest NGOs in the United States, with a conservation budget of $500 million or more each year. To put it another way, this single NGO has a conservation budget nearing the revenue created annually by Pittman-Robertson, although The Nature Conservancy does work around the world as opposed to only in the United States. Smaller conservation NGOs, of which there are hundreds or thousands, fund land acquisition and protection, research, education, lobbying, and public relations. Importantly, none of these sources account for the potentially sizeable amount of time, effort, and money put into local conservation efforts by citizens and landowners.
It is probably impossible to make anything resembling a valid quantitative comparison between the value of hunting and fishing in conservation and the value of all other revenue sources. There are some pretty good examples of bad economic analyses attempting to do exactly that floating around on the internet, but I’ve never seen any attempt that should be treated with even a shred of credibility. On one hand, it would require calculating and tracking nearly a century of revenues earned through Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson excise taxes, Duck Stamps purchased by hunters, hunting and fishing licenses, donations to hunting and fishing NGOs, and money spent by private landowners to improve game habitat. On the other, you would need to calculate the value of conservation lands purchased or claimed (or stolen) through the normal functions of the country, the parts of operating budgets of conservation agencies not funded by hunters and anglers, taxpayer dollars spent on conservation, donations to the hundreds of non-hunting NGOs, the value of research to conservation, and money spent by private landowners to improve habitat for species other than game animals.
In place of a quantitative comparison, I will instead make only the following qualitative estimate about current conservation funding streams and caution you to take it with a grain of salt: less than a quarter of all conservation dollars each year (and probably a lot less) come from hunters and anglers. While I can’t know the exact proportion, claims that sportspeople pay most of the conservation bills in North America are almost certainly wrong.
My point in this piece is not to imply that hunters’ dollars are inconsequential, but instead to clarify that they represent only a part of the operating budget and conservation assets in North America. The conservation community in the United States is large and complex, and different parts of the community are funded through different mechanisms. Hunters, hunting-interest groups, and even state natural resources agencies understandably promote the importance of the sportspeople-pay model because there are tangible benefits in convincing sometimes skeptical non-hunters of the value of hunting. Unfortunately, other sources of conservation funding don’t attract the same advocacy from vocal proponents, and this discrepancy has skewed the perception of conservation funding in the United States.
So while sportspeople certainly play a role in funding conservation, the bulk of funding for conservation in the United States ultimately comes from taxpayers. Claiming hunters and anglers are the engine of conservation funding in the United States is misleading and discounts the role of many other stakeholders. Giving an honest accounting of all the sources of conservation funding does not trivialize the role of hunters and anglers, it simply puts them in context.