Hunters and Anglers Pay for American Conservation and Few People Know It

Name a group that went to Congress and said, please tax us. Not tax somebody else. Tax us, on the equipment we buy, and spend the money on something that benefits everyone. If your first thought is that no such group exists, meet the American sportsman, who did it in 1937 and again in 1950, and whose money is still paying for the deer in your field and the ducks on your pond.

Here is the part that ought to make a fiscal conservative sit up. The program is not a grant, not an appropriation fought over every year, and not a transfer from taxpayers who never see a marsh. It is a user-pays system, run through state agencies, with a track record. And hardly anyone outside the hunting world knows it exists. Let me explain how it works, step by step.

The Terms: User-Pays, Excise Tax and Apportionment

Three definitions, since the explanation depends on them.

A user-pays (or user-fee) model charges the people who use a service for the service. A toll road is user-pays. A general tax that funds the road out of everyone's income is not.

An excise tax is a tax on the sale of a particular product, collected from the manufacturer or importer rather than as a share of your income. The tax on gasoline is an excise tax.

Apportionment is the formula by which collected money is divided among the states. Under the programs below, the formulas reward states with more land area and more licensed hunters or anglers, with a floor so that small states are not left out.

The Problem: The Empty Woods

Go back to the early twentieth century. Market hunting, the commercial killing of game for sale, had devastated wildlife in the decades after the Civil War. The passenger pigeon went extinct in 1914. The bison had been reduced to a remnant. White-tailed deer and wild turkey were scarce across much of the country, and the nation's waterfowl were under pressure from hunting and from drained wetlands. Estimates for deer and turkey in the early decades of the century show populations a small fraction of today's, and you can find the figures in the wildlife agencies' own histories.

The first responses were laws against market hunting and the work of sportsmen's clubs, a story told in Theodore Roosevelt Made Conservation a Conservative Cause, and It Still Is. The Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 banned the worst abuses. But laws that stop killing do not restore habitat or rebuild herds. That takes money, steady money, spent on land, biologists and management. The Depression made the question urgent: where would the money come from?

Step One: The Federal Duck Stamp, 1934

The first answer was the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp, known as the Federal Duck Stamp. Congress passed the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act on March 16, 1934, and President Franklin Roosevelt signed it. The law required every waterfowl hunter over sixteen to buy a stamp each year, at one dollar. The cartoonist Jay N. "Ding" Darling, a conservationist and the head of the Biological Survey at the time, designed the first stamp.

The money goes to buy and lease wetlands and nesting habitat for the National Wildlife Refuge System, through the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund. By law, the large majority of the price of a stamp (at least 90 percent, by the statute's terms as summarized by historians of the program) goes to acquiring habitat, which is why conservation groups praise it as one of the most efficient programs in government. The Fish and Wildlife Service reports that stamp revenue has helped protect millions of acres of habitat; its own figures are the ones to check.

Notice what the stamp is. It is a license-like fee paid by a particular group of users, and the use of the funds is tied by statute to the purpose. Nobody in Washington can divert it to something else. The stamp also doubles as an entry pass to refuges for the buyer, so the user receives something for the money. Many non-hunters buy stamps voluntarily, birdwatchers and collectors who know a good deal when they see one.

Step Two: The Pittman-Robertson Act, 1937

The bigger breakthrough came in 1937. The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, usually called the Pittman-Robertson Act after Senator Key Pittman of Nevada and Representative A. Willis Robertson of Virginia, was signed on September 2, 1937. It took the existing federal excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition, collected from manufacturers, and dedicated the revenue to the states for wildlife restoration.

This is the part that most surprises people. The firearms and ammunition industry and the sportsmen's organizations supported dedicating the tax to wildlife. The tax fell on their own products, and they backed it, because they understood that the game would not return without money for habitat and management. In our day, when almost every industry fights every tax, a trade that backed putting its own tax to work for wildlife is nearly a miracle.

How it works:

1. Manufacturers pay the tax. An excise tax is collected on the sale of firearms, ammunition and related items. The rate is 11 percent on long guns and ammunition and 10 percent on handguns; archery equipment was added later.
2. The Treasury collects it and the Fish and Wildlife Service apportions it. The money is not subject to the annual appropriations scramble. It is a permanent, dedicated appropriation, so a Congress in a hurry cannot raid it by forgetting to renew it.
3. The states receive it by formula. The formula reflects each state's land area and the number of paid hunting license holders.
4. The states must put up a match. The federal share reimburses most of an approved project's cost, and the state supplies the rest, usually from hunting license revenue.
5. A diversion rule protects the money. A state that diverts hunting license fees to some other purpose loses its eligibility for the federal funds. That requirement keeps license money inside the wildlife agency, where the hunters paid for it to go.

Add to that a requirement of results: the money funds projects such as land acquisition, habitat restoration, wildlife surveys and research, and hunter education. Each state submits its projects for approval and reports on the outcome. That is accountability built into the formula.

Step Three: The Dingell-Johnson Act, 1950

The anglers watched and wanted the same. The Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act, known as the Dingell-Johnson Act after Representative John Dingell Sr. of Michigan and Senator Johnson of Colorado, became law in 1950. It imposed an excise tax on fishing rods, reels, lures and related tackle, and sent the proceeds to state fish and wildlife agencies on a similar formula, with a state match.

In 1984 Congress passed the Wallop-Breaux amendments, which broadened the funding by adding taxes on motorboat fuel and other items and by directing money to boating access. The structure is the same: users of the resource pay into a fund, the money flows to the states, and the states spend it on the fisheries and the access that anglers need. Boat ramps, stocking, habitat work and public access trace back to it. The details of the sportsman's conservation model are laid out in Duck stamps and the Dingell-Johnson Act, conservation the sportsman paid for.

What the Money Bought: Deer, Turkey and Wood Ducks

Now the results, in three animals.

White-tailed deer. A century ago they were scarce in large parts of the country. Today the deer population is large enough that deer collisions and crop damage are a management problem in many states. State agencies, funded in significant part by Pittman-Robertson and license fees, restocked deer, set seasons and bag limits, and managed habitat. The recovery is among the most visible in the nation.

Wild turkey. The wild turkey had disappeared from much of its range by the early twentieth century. State wildlife agencies worked to bring it back, and the restoration is often counted among the great wildlife successes of the century. Hunters, through their license dollars, were a main funder.

The wood duck. The wood duck, a bird of forested wetlands, was in serious trouble early in the century, and its hunting was sharply restricted after the 1918 treaty, with seasons not relaxed until 1941. Habitat protection, nesting boxes and regulated seasons helped it return, and it is now one of the most common ducks in the eastern flyways. Duck stamp wetland purchases and state programs played their part.

I do not claim the money did all of it alone. Habitat changes, regulated seasons and the work of private groups mattered, and I say so. The claim is narrower and defensible: the user-pays system provided steady, protected funding that made the other efforts possible. Every one of those animals is in better shape because someone with a hunting license or a box of shells paid for it.

The Steelman: Why Not Just Fund It From General Revenue?

The strongest objection says: wildlife belongs to everyone, so everyone should pay for its protection through general taxes. A user-pays model puts the whole burden on hunters and anglers, and it leaves non-hunters free to enjoy the benefits. Worse, it makes wildlife agencies dependent on the sale of licenses and guns, which gives them an incentive to focus on game species at the expense of the many species that nobody hunts. Some conservationists argue that nongame wildlife has been underfunded as a result.

That is a serious point, and I will answer it in three parts.

First, the general-appropriations alternative has a poor record. Money from the general fund is subject to every budget fight, every shutdown, every shift in political mood. A dedicated, user-funded stream survives all of that. Wildlife managers can plan a decade out because the funding does not need to be won again each year.

Second, user-pays carries a moral logic that conservatives should recognize. The people who benefit most directly pay the most directly, and they pay voluntarily, in the sense that they asked for it. That is a rare thing in federal finance.

Third, the nongame concern is real, and the answer is to expand the user-pays idea, not abandon it. Many states have broadened their funding with programs for nongame species, and some of the benefits of game-species habitat spread to everything that lives there: a wetland bought for ducks shelters a hundred other species. A conservative who wants more funding for nongame species should ask the beneficiaries to contribute, rather than reach into the general fund.

The Constitutional and Moral Frame

There is a constitutional point here too, one Madison would have appreciated. Wildlife is, under the traditional view, held by the states in trust for the people, and the states are the primary managers. The Pittman-Robertson model respects that. The federal government collects the tax and sets standards, but the states design and run the projects. This is federalism in a practical form: federal money, state management, local results. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States, and wildlife management remained a state function largely because the model worked through the states.

Compare it with programs that go the other way, where Washington collects money from everyone, hands it to a bureau, and the bureau decides. This model reverses that, and the results are better. It is also an answer to the lazy claim that conservatives do not care about the outdoors. The family that hunts and fishes is the single largest funder of wildlife restoration in the country. Ask yourself whether the people who write the loudest editorials about nature have ever bought a duck stamp. On the average birder's budget, a duck stamp costs about the same as a decent sandwich, and it does more for the marsh.

The theme runs through the best of conservative thought about land. Stewardship comes from owners and users, backed by accountability and paid for by those who benefit. See how it fits with Farmers Saved the Soil After the Dust Bowl, Long Before Earth Day Existed, where local farmers ran the districts that saved the soil, and with Keep the Farm a Farm With a Conservation Easement, Step by Step, where private owners protect land by voluntary contract.

The case in brief

1. The money that restored American wildlife came largely from sportsmen through the Federal Duck Stamp (1934), the Pittman-Robertson Act (1937) and the Dingell-Johnson Act (1950).
2. Hunters and the firearms industry asked for the excise taxes on their own gear, and fishing tackle makers and anglers followed, a rare case of an industry lobbying to tax itself.
3. The funds are dedicated and distributed to state wildlife agencies by formula with a state match, and a diversion rule keeps license money inside the wildlife agency.
4. Deer, wild turkey and wood ducks recovered under this system of steady, protected funding, alongside habitat work and private efforts.
5. A user-pays model beats general appropriations because it is stable, accountable and voluntary, and the answer to its limits is to extend it to nongame species.

What you can do: buy a Federal Duck Stamp from your local post office or the Fish and Wildlife Service, and look up your state wildlife agency's annual report to see how it spends its Pittman-Robertson funds.