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The more I consider it, the more I wonder if HR2829 isn't just what you are looking for. Consider this: You provide a glimmer of hope by advising property owners use the very Acts that are used against them to fight back, to collect their own data, to show from historical samples that certain lack of actions are also cause for "harm".

Wouldn't required peer review be one way for enterprising businesses to open the regulatory door to free enterprise?

The federal agency wants to shut down a property owners land for whatever reason. They have circled their own peer review wagons and are about to transport that Conglomerate lock stock and barrel to the private property of an individual.

Don't businesses already exist (consulting firms) that make top dollar by using science.........lost the train of thought but I'll leave what I wrote here. Maybe it will come back.

Another instance within Natural Process where evidence exists that peer review would be a good thing is on page 366:

Research for this book encountered technical papers whose conclusions were diametrically at odds with supporting data!

So would required peer review, emprical evidence, field data work to take some of the unconstitutionality out of the ESA? On the same page, you said: In its essence, peer review is a wonderful thing.

The essence of peer review isn't what we have. We won't get it with HR2829.

Unless and until the Federal and State governments are no longer the financial supporters of nearly all university spending, when those supposedly-independent consultants no longer get their pretty paychecks supplying paperwork for civic compliance (and therefore make more money by advocating increasingly arduous regulatory compliance (which they routinely do in those lovely collaborative decisionmaking processes)), when academics are paid by those who own and profit by the success of their habitat management enterprises, then I would want peer review... pursuant to the decision by the certifier whether the risk attendent to a particular operation warrants it. Some jobs are no-brainers. With validated processes, a review can be totally unnecessary.

The delay required for a review might be very destructive. Even a week can cost a pest to get loose. If it is an insect, minutes can be critical. Never thought of that, did you? It wouldn't be the reviewer's butt if the pest got loose and became a bigger problem, would it? That's why we don't want political decision-making.

You see, there is no motive in what you advocate to improve the performance of the system in absolute terms, much less its cost effectiveness of the system, indeed, quite the contrary. The worse it gets, the more they make.