The report also said MacDonald had ordered department scientists to reverse their conclusions on the habitat for bull trout in the Klamath River Basin. She insisted on a 90% reduction in habitat. The final ruling reduced the habitat from 296 miles to 42 miles, an 86% reduction.
Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife and former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, called MacDonald's activities outlined in the report appalling.
"It's pretty incredible how deeply and directionally she reached, ordering changes with no scientific grounding," Clark said. "It was as if compliance with the law was secondary at best, and irrelevant at worst."
The report said MacDonald improperly provided department information to lobbyists and private-sector interests, such as the California Farm Bureau and the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California.
"MacDonald appears to have a close personal and business relationship with a farm bureau lobbyist," the report said.
In once instance, the report said, MacDonald sent information about a contentious endangered species issue to a friend she had met in an online role-playing game. She told investigators she took part in the Internet games to relieve stress created by her job.
MacDonald often overruled government biologists and recommended cutting habitat for threatened species, saying the economic costs outweighed any potential benefits to the species. But she told The Times in 2005 that because of a miscalculation, she had wildly overstated potential costs in at least one case.
In many instances, MacDonald's changes caused scientists to request that their names be removed from documents. The inspector general calculated that in the last six years, 75% of the endangered species reports from the Fish and Wildlife Service's Western offices did not have standard signoffs by scientific staff members.
julie.cart@latimes.com
