Assistance program
State Wildlife Grants
$517.1 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- U.s. Fish and Wildlife Service, Interior, Department of the
- Assistance
- Formula Grants;Project Grants (Discretionary)
- CFDA number
- 15.634
- What it does
- The primary purpose of the State Wildlife Grant (SWG) Program is to help State, Territory, and District of Columbia fish and wildlife agencies design and implement strategic, proactive conservation programs. Formula SWG Program funds, pooled with recipient matching resources, enable these recipients to identify, study, and conserve species deemed most in need of conservation. Competitive SWG Program funds and matching resources typically support large-scale conservation projects involving many partners. Proactive approaches to species conservation help grant recipients, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other conservation partners avoid more prescriptive Federal regulatory requirements associated with listing under the Endangered Species Act. A core principle of the SWG Program is the utilization of effective partnerships demonstrating cooperation and leveraging of resources to achieve shared conservation goals benefiting recipient-identified species of greatest conservation need.
- Who benefits
- General Public (While direct participation is limited to fish and wildlife agencies, the public will ultimately benefit from these wildlife conservation measures.)
- Who applies
- Agencies from the 50 States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Territories of Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa with primary responsibility for fish and wildlife conservation may submit grant proposals for formula or competitive project grants to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if they maintain a current, Service-approved State Wildlife Action Plan. The four regional Associations of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (NEAFWA, SEAFWA, MAFWA, and WAFWA) are eligible for competitive project grants at the discretion of recipient State fish and wildlife agencies.
- Authorized by
- Further Additional Continuing Appropriations and Other Extensions Act, 2024; Continuing Appropriations Act, 2024 and Other Extensions Act; and prior-year appropriations acts.
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