A draft 156-page bill to fund the Interior Department for the coming fiscal year contains language that would strip Endangered Species Act protections from wolves in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks and impede the National Park Service's efforts to ban the sale of disposable water bottles in the park system.

The legislation, scheduled to be marked up Wednesday morning by the House Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee, if approved by Congress in its current form would also increase logging on public lands and block future ESA protections for the Greater Sage-grouse, according to conservation groups.

Tucked roughly halfway through the legislation are two sentences that would remove ESA protections that currently apply to wolves in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, as well as in the western Great Lakes. The language directs the Interior secretary to "reissue the final rule published on December 28, 2011 (76 Fed. Reg. 81666 et seq.) and the final rule published on September 10, 2012 (77 Fed. Reg. 55530 et seq.), without regard to any other provision of statute or regulation that applies to issuance of such rules."

Those rules were issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The first delisted gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region, and the second did the same for wolves in Wyoming, as well as removing the "experimental population" designation placed on wolves related to the wolf recovery project in Yellowstone.

The House language also would block any judicial review of those rules.

"This is the most extreme, anti-wolf Congress our country has ever seen," Jamie Pang, an endangered species campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Tuesday evening in a release. “Rather than allowing for wolf recovery to follow a course prescribed by science, a small group of politicians has repeatedly tried to undermine species protections through unrelated policy riders tacked onto must-pass federal spending bills.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service removed protections for gray wolves in the Great Lakes region (Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota) in 2011, and in Wyoming in 2012. In both instances, federal judges overturned agency decisions for prematurely removing protections, failing to follow the requirements of the Act and failing to follow the best available science," she went on. "Republican lawmakers have responded by repeatedly attempting to remove protections from wolves and open the animals up to state-regulated hunting and trapping. Since the passage of the 2011 wolf rider that removed protections from wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, there have been almost 30 legislative attacks on wolves in Congress. Already in 2016 there have been 10 legislative attacks, surpassing the number of anti-wolf bills for all of 2015."

At Defenders of Wildlife, CEO Jamie Rappaport Clark referred to the riders as "kudzo," saying "each year, we pull them out by the roots, and each year they’re back again."

“Americans want to see our lands and wildlife protected now and for future generations. Ninety percent of American voters support the protections provided to wildlife by the Endangered Species Act," she added in a release. “But some in Congress refuse to follow the will of the American people or the law. They try to end run Endangered Species Act protections and other fundamental environmental laws through these hidden riders. We have seen these attacks on wildlife again and again in our nation’s most important federal funding legislation. We hope that environmental champions in Congress will see through these stealthy attacks on America’s land, water and wildlife and put a stop to them.”

Not far below the section pertaining to delisting wolves was another that would prevent the Park Service from using Interior Department funding to "implement, administer, or enforce Policy Memorandum 11–03 or to approve a request by a park superintendent to eliminate the sale in national parks of water in disposable, recyclable plastic bottles."

Park Service Director Jon Jarvis in December 2011 gave units across the National Park System the option of banning the sale of disposable water bottles and installing water-filling stations, but only after completing a feasibility study and gaining approval from their respective regional offices. 

Since then, there have been occasional efforts in Congress to prevent park superintendents from enforcing bottle bans. Fewer than two dozen parks parks had instituted bottle bans and installed, or were in the process of installing, water-filling stations, according to a March letter from the Park Service to key congressional committee chairs.