Is The Death Of The Legendary Grizzly Bear Study Team Near—And What Does It Symbolize?

by Todd Wilkinson

Think of the unparalleled grandeur—and miracle—that is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, but view it as an inverted pyramid. 

All that is visible to us—it’s richness of biological diversity and the health of its iconic public lands—is held up by something that may be invisible to most Americans: a triangular, triumvirate cornerstone of peer-reviewed science, good, dedicated civil service stewards, and environmental laws forming a critical base forged over the last century.

Now that is crumbling.

As of this writing, credit Elon Musk, an unelected special agent of President Donald Trump and his young, urban tech hipsters at DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency) with being on the verge of recklessly destroying one of the most respected government-run wildlife research organizations on Earth.

Last week, the leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team—the renowned unit operating within the federal USGS that has served as a global model for how to study large elusive animals— retired and, insiders say, is unlikely to be replaced. That leader, Frank van Manen, could not be reached for comment.

His departure means, amid the helter-skelter atmosphere of chaos that DOGE has spawned, including the proposed closure of the USGS Northern Rockies Science Center (NOROC) office in Bozeman—that the grizzly bear study team’s storied existence may be over because in this age of demonizing public employees there likely will be no replacements hired for those who are forced out. 

Originating in the early 1970s to monitor the tiny Yellowstone-area grizzly population—and following the pioneering radio-telemetry work with grizzlies done by the brothers Frank and John Craighead—the grizzly bear study team, more than any other entity, laid the groundwork for grizzly recovery in the Lower 48 to happen. In those days, after open trash dumps were closed, bears addicted to human food, were dying faster than new cubs replacing them were being born. The population was crashing.

In place of seat-of-the-pants, political-driven management, the study team amassed empirical data that was intensively scrutinized, even by noted study team scientists like the late David J. Mattson.

No one knows the importance of the grizzly bear study team more than Dr. Christopher Servheen, who started his career with grizzlies shortly after the study team began. Servheen worked closely with the study team as he, for 35 years, led the national grizzly bear recovery program for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

“There would be no grizzly bears in the Yellowstone ecosystem if it wasn’t for the science collected by the study team and implemented into management improvements by the grizzly bear recovery effort,” Servheen, who is shocked and disappointed by the actions and consequences of Musk and DOGE, told me.

“The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is increasingly under siege with more people, more development of private lands, increasing recreation pressure and now the looming potential liquidation of public lands. All these things are increasingly dangerous to the survival of grizzly bears. The fact is that Americans support  the kind of science-based wildlife conservation across generations that has resulted in the Greater Yellowstone grizzly population we see today,” he added. “Citizens have supported science and the dividends it has delivered is part of our shared heritage. Without the study team documenting the impacts on bears and informing responsive interagency management, Greater Yellowstone grizzlies will be at grave risk of sliding backward to again face the pit of minimal numbers and then imminent extinction.” 

Read the recent letter sent to members of Montana’s Congressional Delegation regarding DOGE’s nefarious and untransparently articulated push to sell off the building in Bozeman that is home to the grizzly bear study team and scientific experts dealing with a variety of issues of great public interest like research on water quality and its availability, epizootic diseases such as brucellosis, Chronic Wasting Disease and avian flu, invasive species and the impacts to our national park ecosystems due to documented climate change

The letter is signed by 42 retired and active research professionals with 1,350 years of accumulated professional experience carrying out science in the public interest. Given its accomplishments, the grizzly study team has been a high-profile symbol of government foresight and advanced thinking in building a foundation of empirical facts on which to assess the difficult conservation challenges facing the grizzly bear. Over the years hundreds of people, many renowned today, have worked with and for the study team. 

“We acknowledge that government agencies should always strive to be leaner and identify ways to increase efficiency. However, indiscriminately cutting agencies and their highly experienced workforce especially in western states with high proportions of public lands under the guise of efficiency without intimate knowledge and evaluation of the important work they do, will ultimately do a great disservice to Montana and to America,” the 42 retired, former and active government scientists write. “Although these cuts directly affect Federal agencies, they will also damage Montana state agencies’ abilities to manage natural resources skillfully….Our public lands and the public’s use of them would be severely impacted by unwarranted terminations of the scientists at NOROCK. At risk wildlife populations will decline and perhaps disappear.”

Servheen points to another issue that states and the new US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik (who formerly oversaw Wyoming Game and Fish) must now contend with: If the intention of the current Administration is to eliminate the grizzly study team members along with the study team itself as a functional, adequately-funded organization, the delisting of the Greater Yellowstone grizzly population—i.e. removing it from federal protection under the Endangered Species Act—is not possible. 

Without a fully functional USGS-led grizzly bear study team, the framework for delisting contained in a plan known as the “Conservation Strategy,” required for delisting, and which the states agreed to abide by as a condition of the hand-off of management to them from the feds, will no longer function and would be null and void.

Another related issue is that Servheen himself was lead author of the existing grizzly bear recovery plan. He wrote it back in 1993, and it is still in place as a document referenced by states trying to force delisting. Servheen, however, says the plan is grossly antiquated, and is not based on the best available science which has emerged over the last 32 years. 

Members of Congress backing delisting often called Servheen to testify on Capitol Hill, where he recently testified again on March 4, 2025. Notably, Servheen was once a proponent of delisting but in recent years has become an opponent, saying bear recovery is currently being undermined by state laws that are hostile to carnivores and will lead to more bears needlessly dying. In addition, undeniable trends of rural sprawl are permanently removing habitat for bears and other species that, in 1993, that habitat was considered secure and supported an optimistic prediction for bears that no longer exists.

Efforts to gut the grizzly bear study team, he says, are consistent with the negative trends and denial of real-world conditions.

The grizzly study team was not without its fierce critics, who included the late bear researcher Mattson, a former longtime study team member. Mattson’s peer-reviewed scientific analyses, especially on key food sources driving the growth of the bear population, were widely cited by colleagues. He believed the states could not be trusted to responsibly look after bears, especially given their recent record with wolves.

In recent years, Servheen, who had been the target of some of Mattson’s harsh appraisals, said Mattson was right in many of his concerns, including his suspicions about the motivations of the states, and their reversion to the kind of hostile cultural attitudes that nearly annihilated bears in the first place.

If Mattson and Servheen were united in two things, those were their belief that free market economists, “who know the price of everything but the value of nothing” are now promoting a 21st century version of Manifest Destiny, treating the West again as a natural resource colony there to be plundered. They also agreed that grizzly populations can quickly decline if the multiple factors that cause bear deaths are not monitored and held in vigilant check.

Musk and DOGE are not without accomplices in their narrow-minded thinking to hobble government institutions and muzzle or force out scientists and other civil servants who might dare question their agenda.

These accomplices include so-called environmental free-market think tanks and funders like the Heritage Foundation that have worked for years behind the scenes to hobble the functionality of federal government agencies. They are now saying that in order to save our forests and protect homes being unwisely built in the wildland-urban-interface from fire, they must be liquidated of trees. Alongside DOGE are elected officials from Montana, Wyoming and Idaho who are sitting in silence as DOGE forces the abrupt hand out of pink slips. The politicians are obviously too afraid to speak up but as part of their own anti-government, anti-environment fever dreams are destroying the very things that have made America great as a global beacon of conservation.

Let’s identify two of the accomplices: US Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who along with current Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, became plutocrats while working together at Gianforte’s tech company, Right Now Technologies, and made a fortune upon its $1.5 billion sale to Oracle.

Are you among the minions chronically frustrated by, when you call a company with an inquiry or problem, you can’t actually get a live human being on the other end of the line? Is this experience saving you valuable time and giving you peace of mind? More recently, is your experience interacting with AI-generated voices better?

Among RightNow Technologies’ innovative products were customer service tools for clients that made US human employees redundant and expendable, viewed as costly non-productive liabilities to bottom line profit. It’s not altogether different from the ruthless attitude of DOGE—a conceit to make government operate more like that version of the private sector.

Both Daines, who grew up in Bozeman and one would think understands the importance of public lands employees, and Gianforte, have polished their public personas as being tech-savvy strategists informed by futurist science. It’s ironic that Musk claims to be a brilliant advocate of science and practicality, but critics say his actions—lacking in transparency, accountability and appreciation for the human dimension of America’s public lands legacy—prove in his evasive aloofness he is neither. 

Telling is how our elected officials are unwilling to appear at town hall meetings in affected communities and answer to constituents who, across the political aisle, have legitimate concerns about the upheaval.

What DOGE is doing, by eviscerating America’s public land agencies and the science programs in USGS, NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), amounts to demolishing the very things that have made US science the world leader in conservation, space exploration, medicine, weather prediction and health care. “This is an astonishingly destructive thing to do,” Servheen said, “and there is no reason to do this other than an extremist anti-science and anti-government employee vendetta.” 

Why, other than hidden and murky agendas, Servheen asks, is such radical action being taken, allegedly in the name of fixing agencies that are obviously starved of necessary resources, but not broken?

Recently, in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Montana’s newly-elected US Sen. Tim Sheehy, claimed that DOGE efforts were designed to “unleash prosperity” and “revive the American dream.” The National Park Service was, for many decades, viewed by Americans as one of the most respected and beloved agencies in the federal government. The reason for that has been the devoted, friendly and educated staff of rangers on the front lines interacting with visitors, making them feel welcomed, valued and informed.

Members of Congress from Western states have helped channel billions of dollars in infrastructure spending to Yellowstone and other national parks to accommodate record numbers of people while, at the same time, parks have less, per capita, funds available to hire ranger-naturalists to interact with and manage the sometimes unruly hordes. According to a dozen different park employees I interviewed, they say morale in Yellowstone and Grand Teton has plummeted, not because of the leadership from superintendents in those parks but the fear and adversarial conditions created by the Trump Administration.

Obviously, eliminating waste and inefficiency in government is a good thing, but land management agencies have been doing that for many years. Free marketeers, among which Sheehy counts himself as a disciple, have created a bogeyman perception that federal land management agencies are awash in lazy non-essential employees. The truth is this: the right and honorable Sen. Sheehy is more likely to have Bigfoot answer the phone at a call center on the other side of the world than he—or DOGE—is likely to find significant evidence of bloat, waste, fraud and abuse among the already-thinned ranks of field staff in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, national forests, wildlife refuges and BLM district offices.

But let’s return to the topic at hand: the fact we still have grizzly bears in Greater Yellowstone when, in the early 1980s, our best scientists believed the population could be lost. States then resented grizzly recovery and they still do today. The things that revived the bear population were reducing the number of bears being killed and addressing the things that caused conflicts, safeguarding habitat (that also benefitted hundreds of other species), and educating the public with science-based facts worked. The need for those things hasn’t gone away; they’ve only become more urgently necessary as the region fills up with a lot more people.

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Were it not for the grizzly recovery effort under the Endangered Species Act using information produced by the grizzly bear study team on grizzly bear behavior, habitat and food habits, as well as research into how to manage wildlife across boundaries and prevent conflicts with humans, grizzlies would not be present today in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems. 

Think about that. There would’ve been no Grizzly 399 and the 30 or so offspring, and cubs of offspring in her bloodline. There would be no “grizzly bear economy” that annually serves as a major anchor to the $1.5 billion generated annually, with grizzly and wolf watching in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks alone being major attractions. Plus, millions of park visitors would never have seen a grizzly bear, Servheen says, and likely other species that benefit from protected bear habitat. There also would not be the profound sense of pride Americans have with living in a country where leaders of both parties have responsibly reflected the importance of saving some of  these magnificent animals so we could still have them around today. 

One has to wonder about the level of ecological and civic competency DOGE apparatchiks possess. One has to ask if they have any clue on what is required to keep ecosystems and wildlife populations healthy. Who are they to assess from afar the competence of veteran experts they have never met?

DOGE is not only needlessly and impetuously selling office space necessary for working professionals to do their jobs in Bozeman and across the country, but it is breaking the spirit of dedicated civil servants in multiple agencies like Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, BLM and others by threatening them with being fired for no reason. No successful private sector company would adopt this as a best business practice. It is also having hugely negative and traumatic effects on their families and communities, in addition to sowing fear and paranoia just like what existed during the Cold War with government workers in East Germany, Russia and other former Soviet Union Bloc nations under repressive dictatorships. Is that where we are headed? 

What’s happening now isn’t new. The dismantling of federal agencies in the US has been part of a grand plan dating back to the Reagan years, when free marketeers and their funders hatched strategies to destroy environmental agencies and federal laws they loathed.

I’ve been writing about it, and researching it, for decades. The strategy goes like this: First you slowly starve the agencies, which forces them to cut personnel and results in fewer people available to complete essential tasks. This crashes employee morale. Then, when inevitable examples of dysfunction arise, you claim the agencies and people who work for them are incompetent.

From that, schemes are implemented to eliminate civil servants and privatize the function of those agencies by contracting tasks out to the private sector (which has no notion of the esprit de corps of agencies, commitment and loyalty to representing the best interests of the American people that accumulated over decades).

After you do that, you start making the case for selling off public lands to the highest bidder because the agencies can no longer manage these public lands which is precisely the result of you having destroyed that capability. Selling off public lands to the uber wealthy allows free-market strategists to turn formerly public lands into private fiefdoms.

Another plan involves turning public lands over to states, which then sell them off. This happened in Wyoming recently with the so-called “Kelly state school trust parcel” given to the states by the federal government in the 19^thcentury. Located inside, Grand Teton National Park, it possessed extraordinary ecological value. The park and wildlife-loving public was basically told by the Wyoming legislature to pay an inflated sum—$100 million for 640 acres— or the state would sell the land to the highest bidder, likely a developer. This is a scenario certain to be repeated if Wyoming and other states take control of federal lands.

In many ways, Servheen says,the potential destruction of the grizzly bear study team represents the worst fear of American wildlife advocates because it means bear management will no longer be informed by the best possible science. States can pretend the baseline of science the study team created no longer exists.

As experts note, employing the best possible science is the only hope grizzlies have of persisting through a future when millions of acres of prime habitat are being lost to sprawl on private land in the Northern Rockies and industrial outdoor recreation comes to dominate front and backcountry areas where habitat was also once thought secure.

What Musk, DOGE, Trump, Daines et al. are doing is the equivalent of marching the Lorax to a town square and executing him to make a point. What point is it?

Eventually, however, when Americans wake up to what’s being squandered, it may be too late.

Let Musk and crew rocket off to Mars and see how “inhabitable” it is. Here on Earth, nature is what makes life worth living, and wildness is what sets our corner of it apart as special.  

The  upshot: few want to live in the Dark Ages where ignorance pervades, and ignorant people become tools of plutocrats. Everything we cherish about Greater Yellowstone and once considered inviolate— its lands, wildlife and civil servants— is under attack by DOGE, this Administration and their enablers in Congress. 

If we allow it to be broken, it can never be put back together again, or ever be as good as it was.