Assistance program
Wildlife Restoration and Basic Hunter Education and Safety
$7.5 Billion committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- U.s. Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior, Department of the
- Assistance
- Formula Grants
- CFDA number
- 15.611
- What it does
- The Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act provides grants to State, Commonwealth, and territorial fish and wildlife agencies for projects to restore, conserve, manage, and enhance wild birds and mammals and their habitat. Projects also include providing public use and access to wildlife resources; hunter education and safety; the development and management of shooting ranges, and the promotion of hunting and recreational shooting.
- Who benefits
- State governments, U.S. Territories, and Commonwealths
- Who applies
- State governments, U.S. Territories, and Commonwealths Participation is limited to State, Territory, or Commonwealth agencies (excluding the District of Columbia) with lead management responsibility for fish and wildlife resources in the United States of America. These entities must pass laws (assent legislation) for the conservation of fish and wildlife. The law(s) must require that revenue from hunting and fishing licenses be only used for the administration of the fish and wildlife agency.
- Authorized by
- Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act—Wildlife Restoration and Basic Hunter Education (16 U.S.C. §669 et seq., except as Pub. L. 106-553 is applied) as amended Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act (Public Law 116-17, May 10, 2019), as amended Modernizing …
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments