An independent evaluation of the two agencies that split fish and wildlife duties in Pennsylvania recommends closer coordination on shared functions, without recommending that the state fold them into a single agency.
Pennsylvania is the only state where fish and wildlife management sit inside two separate state agencies. One agency runs hunting, trapping, and game-lands management. The other runs fishing, boating, and aquatic-resource management. Both were commissioned to sit down for a joint third-party review, and the Wildlife Management Institute — a national nonprofit that has done similar evaluations for other states — did the work.
The report walks through where the two agencies already share systems, where they duplicate them, and where cooperation would save time and money. Its recommendations focus on information technology, communications, legal work, human resources, and law enforcement dispatch — areas where both agencies do variants of the same job in parallel. The report does not call for a merger, and the two agencies each issued statements saying a merger is not on the table.
The scale of the two agencies is a large part of the reason coordination matters. The Game Commission traces its founding to 1895 and today runs a workforce of more than 700 full-time employees with roughly a thousand additional part-time and volunteer roles. Its most recent published annual budget totaled about $266.5 million. The Fish and Boat Commission was founded in 1866 under Governor Andrew Curtin. Its policy is set by a board of 10 commissioners who serve unpaid, eight-year terms.
The Fish and Boat Commission has issued fishing licenses every year since 1922, and both agencies collect the bulk of their operating revenue from license sales, permit fees, and federal excise-tax pass-throughs on hunting and fishing equipment. Neither agency draws from Pennsylvania’s general fund for its core work, and that funding model is one reason a full consolidation has never advanced.
Hunters and anglers in Pennsylvania will not see immediate change on the ground. Licenses, seasons, and enforcement authority stay where they are. The report gives each agency a shared list of joint targets to work toward — a permit system that speaks the same language on both sides, a communications approach that treats the outdoor participant as one customer, and a way to prevent parallel investment in the same software and hardware.
