Species Act for 10 years, as long as states prepare and carry out plans to protect the species within their borders. Facing a court-ordered deadline of October 2015, the Department of the Interior on September 22, 2015, was forced by the US Congress just before the deadline, by adding language in the 2015 Appropriations bill to stop the listing, not to list the bird as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The language in the 2015 bill, "Prohibits funds from being used to write or issue rules pursuant to the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and related to the sage-grouse." As rationale for its decision, the Department said it would rely on a new land-management plan to protect the sage grouse's habitat of 165 million acres across eleven Western states. The designation under the ESA would likely have led to land-use and other restrictions that critics feared would have economic impacts, possibly restricting oil and gas development and homebuilding. In issuing its finding, the FWS stated that: This measure was repeated in the 2016 appropriations bill. For the 2017 bill, the Columbia Basin population was added — Sec. 114: For the 2018 appropriations bill, over the objections of conservationists and the Democratic party, Congress applied similar measures to two other species: the gray wolf and the lesser prairie chicken. Despite the Department of the Interior's decision not to list the greater sage-grouse as threatened or endangered, legal efforts to protect the sage-grouse continue. For instance, in May 2016 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a planned wind energy project in Harney County, Oregon could not proceed until the Bureau of Land Management adequately studied whether the project site provided winter habitat for sage-grouses. On December 6, 2018, the government announced a plan to roll back protections for the sage grouse to open nine million acres of land to wind and solar farms, drilling, mining, and cornfields for the production of government mandated ethanol. Canada The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) designated the greater sage-grouse as Threatened in 1997, and re-designated the species as Endangered in April 1998. The status was reevaluated and confirmed in May 2000 and April 2008. The greater sage-grouse is listed on Schedule 1 of Canada's Species at Risk Act, as Endangered. In 2013, the Canadian Governor in Council on behalf of the