Barack Obama has told the Department of the Interior to reconsider a regulation introduced a month before the Bush administration left office, which made it easier for federal agencies to make decisions concerning threatened or endangered species without consulting biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service. (See earlier Nature news story here.) “I think we know who would have been the winner in this fox guarding the hen house scenario advanced by the Bush administration, and it would not be the hens,” Congressman Nick Rahall, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, told the Washington Post.

The December 16, 2008, regulation is now officially under review, and in the meantime agency heads must continue their former usual consultations with the FWS and NMFS, the memo says. Environmentalists are predictably pleased, but Obama would need to formally issue a new rule — or Congress would have to push through a resolution — to make the change permanent.