The Trump Administration may step in and take over Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program and management. Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum told Colorado officials in a December letter that the state has 60 days to deliver a report addressing two compliance issues the Department of Interior highlighted as its reasons to step in.
Colorado’s wolf reintroduction has not been without hiccups. The third set of wolves has not yet been sourced and now the federal government is threatening to step in.
The Dec. 18 letter from Burgum was obtained by The Coloradoan via public records request. In that letter, Burgum notes that between Jan. 12 and Jan. 18, 2025, without notice, CPW released 15 wolves imported from Canada; and on Dec. 17, 2025, USFWS was informed that CPW recently released a wolf from a pack with a confirmed history of depredation.
Burgum told CPW that within 60 days it must submit a complete report of all gray wolf conservation and management activities that have occurred since Dec. 12, 2023, or the memorandum of agreement between Colorado and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be terminated. Relocation and lethal removal would then fall under USFWS guidance.
The reference to the release of a wolf from a pack with a confirmed history of depredation is about gray wolf 2403, which was recently captured about 40 miles south of the Colorado border in New Mexico. The wolf was part of the Copper Creek Pack which did have a history of livestock depredation in Grand County, but there has not been any reports of wolf 2403 preying on livestock.
The Colorado Sun, through open records request, obtained communications from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that approved the transfer of wolves from Canada and that wildlife officials were cleared to proceed.
A Feb. 14, 2024, letter sent to CPW’s wolf conservation program manager Eric Odell cited the lack of endangered listing for Canadian wolves and said because of that no federal authority was needed to approve the transfer.
The USFWS reversed that decision in October when USFWS director Brian Nesvik sent a letter to then-director of CPW Jeff Davis stating that Colorado was in violation of the Endangered Species Act by transporting Canadian wolves into Colorado.
Republicans in Congress, led by Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, passed the Pet and Livestock Protection Act in December that would delist gray wolves from the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Boebert, along with some others in the federal government, said that wolves are already at a stable population and are harming the cattle and livestock industries beyond repair.
The bill was passed in the House by a vote of 211-204 and was sent to the Senate. If approved, the bill would require delisting gray wolves from federal protections within 60 days of becoming law.
The bill has a crucial piece of language that Boebert, along with 36 other Republican Representatives, were keen on retaining: “Reissuance of the final rule under section 2 shall not be subject to judicial review.”
This piece of language in the bill would prohibit any future challenges to the delisting of wolves in federal court.
She argued that the bill lets state and tribal governments have control over wolf management, saying wolf reintroduction efforts put “predators over people.”
Boebert condemned bringing wolves from Canada, calling them “foreign predators.”
In Nesvik’s letter, he told Colorado that wolves must come from the Northern Rocky Mountain states of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, or part of Washington.
According to the Colorado Sun, while Nesvik claimed Colorado violated the federal 10(j) rule, that very same rule states that the northern Rocky Mountain population of wolves “is part of a larger metapopulation of wolves that encompasses all of Western Canada.” Because of the population numbers in Canada, the USFWS and CPW determined that any negative impacts to the donor population would be “negligible.”
