The Pollinator Protection & Restoration Act

A Model Act to Protect Pollinators Through a Dedicated Industry-Funded Pollinator Protection Fund

Model Legislative Proposal · Prepared by Apiary · For consideration by legislators, regulators, and the public · Drafting basis: established U.S. and international precedent in dedicated conservation finance

This is a model bill. It is written to be picked up, marked up, and improved by drafting counsel. Where a number is meant to show how the math works rather than to fix policy, it is labeled illustrative. The goal is not to punish an industry. The goal is to convert a tiny, barely-felt, per-unit contribution from the makers and sellers of documented bee-harming pesticides into a large, dedicated, and accountable fund for pollinator recovery — using a financing structure the United States has already run successfully for nearly ninety years.

The ideal outcome is fewer bee-toxic chemicals applied. Until that ideal arrives, the units already being sold should help pay to repair the harm they cause.

Section 1. Short Title

This Act may be cited as the "Pollinator Protection and Restoration Act."

Section 2. Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this Act is to establish a dedicated, non-divertible funding stream for the restoration and protection of managed and wild pollinators in the United States, financed by a small per-unit contribution assessed on the manufacturers, importers, first sellers, and heavy commercial applicators of pesticide products documented to harm pollinators. The Act is expressly modeled on the proven structure of the Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act (1937), under which a manufacturers' excise tax on a related industry has funded wildlife conservation for generations without passing through general appropriations.

This Act does not seek to prohibit lawful pesticide use. Its premise is that the preferred path — reduced use of bee-toxic chemicals — should be rewarded, and that while heavy use continues, the volume of that use should contribute, at a rate barely perceptible per unit, to undoing the documented harm.

Section 3. Findings

Congress finds the following:

Solid line: reported U.S. annual managed-colony loss rate, 2015–2025 (Bee Informed Partnership / AIA–Auburn surveys); the 2024–25 figure of 55.6% is the worst on record. Dashed lines are an illustrative extrapolation of the trend versus an intervention path — shown to make the stakes legible, not as a precise forecast.

(a) Catastrophic colony loss. Beekeepers in the United States have reported annual honey bee colony losses approaching and at times exceeding half of all managed colonies — losses on the order of 55 percent in severe years — a rate far above what the industry considers sustainable. The 2015 National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators (Pollinator Health Task Force, 2015) set an explicit federal goal of reducing overwinter colony losses to sustainable levels.
(b) Global pollinator decline. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has assessed that more than 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species — particularly bees and butterflies — face the risk of extinction.
(c) The food-supply stake, stated honestly. A widely cited figure holds that roughly one in three bites of food depends on pollinators. The honest nuance is that staple grains such as wheat, rice, and corn are largely wind-pollinated and do not depend on bees; the pollinator-dependent share is concentrated in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and the diversity, nutritional quality, and flavor of the diet. The dependence is real and economically significant even though it is not the entire food supply.
(d) Documented harm from neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoid insecticides — including acetamiprid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam — are systemic, persistent in soil and water, and toxic to bees at field-relevant exposures. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own pollinator actions reflect this: 2013 labeling requirements prohibiting application of certain neonicotinoids when bees are present; a 2017 policy protecting bees during contracted pollination services; a temporary halt on approving new outdoor neonicotinoid uses pending bee data; and January 2020 proposed interim registration-review decisions adding bloom-period restrictions and cancelling imidacloprid residential turf spray uses (US EPA, EPA Actions to Protect Pollinators).
(e) A federal regulatory gap. EPA neonicotinoid registration reviews continued into 2024–2025, but U.S. federal restrictions remain slower and weaker than the European Union's neonicotinoid bans. In the absence of strong federal action, states — including California, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Illinois (agricultural uses), and Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, and Washington (non-agricultural uses) — have enacted their own restrictions. This patchwork justifies a dedicated federal funding mechanism for pollinator recovery, distinct from the regulatory question of which uses to restrict (US EPA; Audubon, Neonicotinoid Bans and Restrictions).
(f) Industry-funded conservation works. Under the Pittman-Robertson Act (1937), codified at 16 U.S.C. 669 et seq., a federal manufacturers' excise tax (11 percent on long guns, ammunition, and archery equipment; 10 percent on handguns) has financed wildlife restoration continuously since 1938. In 2023 alone the program apportioned $1.2 billion to the states, and it has distributed nearly $17 billion since inception (Wildlife for All, P-R Act Explained). The principle — an industry tied to a resource impact pays a modest per-unit levy into a locked conservation fund — is settled U.S. law.
(g) The "deplete one resource, fund another" model is established. The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF Act, 1965) is financed almost entirely by federal offshore oil and gas royalties rather than taxpayer general funds, and the Great American Outdoors Act (2020) made its full $900 million annual deposit permanent and mandatory (Congressional Research Service, RL33531; DOI). This Act applies the same logic to pesticide impact on pollinators.
(h) Per-product and per-sale pesticide levies already exist in U.S. law. Under FIFRA, EPA charges an annual registration maintenance fee of $4,875 per registered product for FY2025–FY2026, targeting an average of $42 million per year and funding roughly one-third of EPA's pesticide program (US EPA, FY2026 Maintenance Fee; CRS, RL32218). California's mill assessment levies a per-dollar charge on pesticide sales at first point of sale — currently 27 mills (2.7 cents per dollar), rising to 29 mills (July 2026) and 30 mills (July 2027) — supplying about 80 percent of the Department of Pesticide Regulation's fund (California DPR, Mill Assessment). The mechanism this Act proposes is therefore not novel; it is a dedicated-purpose application of structures already operating.
(i) International precedent confirms feasibility and behavioral effect. France's redevance pour pollutions diffuses (RPD) levies a per-substance charge modulated by toxicity, collected through distributors and earmarked to water agencies, the national Ecophyto reduction plan, and the French Biodiversity Office, raising roughly EUR 180 million per year (Lynxee Consulting; Agence de l'eau Seine-Normandie). Denmark's load-differentiated tax (DKK 20/kg base plus a load score multiplier), paid by manufacturers and distributors, drove an estimated 16 percent reduction in national pesticide load — proving such a levy changes behavior (Danish EPA; Land Use Policy ex-post evaluation). Sweden has taxed per kilogram of active ingredient since 1984 (SEK 34/kg in 2021), and Norway uses a five-band hazard formula (Nordic Council of Ministers; Mattilsynet).
(j) A cautionary design finding. Denmark's pesticide-tax revenue was originally earmarked but was later swept into the Ministry's general funds, and Norway returns its revenue to farmers as income support rather than to conservation. These outcomes demonstrate that an earmark is only as durable as the statute that locks it. This Act therefore hard-codes non-diversion (Section 7).

Section 4. Definitions

For purposes of this Act:

(1) "Covered pesticide product" means any pesticide product registered under FIFRA whose labeled active ingredient appears on the Bee-Toxic Active Ingredient Schedule established under Section 5(b), including but not limited to the neonicotinoids acetamiprid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam, and any successor compound the Administrator determines to present comparable documented pollinator toxicity.
(2) "Covered party" means a manufacturer, producer, importer, or first seller of a covered pesticide product into commerce in the United States, and a heavy commercial applicator as defined in paragraph (3).
(3) "Heavy commercial applicator" means a person licensed to apply pesticides for hire who applies covered pesticide products above a threshold annual volume set by regulation, exempting small operators and individual landowners below that threshold.
(4) "Unit" means a standardized measure of a covered pesticide product — by kilogram of active ingredient, by dollar of first-sale value, or by treated acre — as specified for each rate basis in Section 5.
(5) "Fund" means the Pollinator Protection Fund established in Section 6.
(6) "Sanctuary" means a managed parcel of pollinator habitat meeting the diversity and bloom-continuity standards in Section 6(d), modeled on USDA Conservation Reserve Program practice CP-42 (Pollinator Habitat), which requires a mix of at least nine pollinator-friendly species providing blooms across the growing season.
(7) "Pay-for-proof" means the verification regime in Section 8 conditioning disbursement on measured ecological outcomes.

Section 5. The Pollinator Offset Levy

Section 5(b). The per-unit charge climbs with a chemical's documented hazard to pollinators, so the levy itself steers the market toward gentler chemistry. Bands and percentages are illustrative placeholders for the toxicity schedule the Administrator would set — the toxicity-modulated structure mirrors France's RPD biodiversity levy.

(a) Imposition. There is imposed on each covered party a Pollinator Offset Levy on every unit of covered pesticide product that the party manufactures, imports, first sells, or applies as a heavy commercial applicator. Consistent with the Pittman-Robertson model, the levy is assessed on the covered party at the manufacturer/first-sale/applicator level — not collected at retail as a separate consumer line item.

(b) Bee-Toxic Active Ingredient Schedule. The Administrator shall publish and annually update a schedule of covered active ingredients, assigning each a toxicity band based on documented pollinator hazard — adopting the toxicity-modulation principle of France's RPD and Denmark's load-differentiated tax, so that the most bee-harmful substances carry the highest per-unit rate.

(c) Rate basis and tiers. The levy offers the following payment options. All rate figures in this subsection are illustrative — included to show the compounding arithmetic, not to fix the statutory number, which drafting counsel and economic analysis should set.

Tier A — Standard per-unit levy. An illustrative rate of $0.02 (two cents) per dollar of first-sale value of a covered product — modeled directly on California's mill assessment (2.7 cents per dollar) but set lower — or, at the Administrator's election for a given product class, an illustrative $3.00 per kilogram of active ingredient, in the manner of Sweden's flat per-kilogram charge (SEK 34/kg ≈ EUR 3.3/kg). The rate is modulated upward by the toxicity band under subsection (b).
Tier B — Reduced rate for verified reduction (the incentive tier). A covered party that documents a year-over-year reduction in the volume of covered active ingredient it sells or applies pays a reduced per-unit rate on its remaining covered units — illustratively half the Tier A rate — scaled to the percentage reduction achieved. This rewards movement toward the ideal outcome and mirrors the behavior-changing effect Denmark documented (~16 percent load reduction).
Tier C — Voluntary contribution tier. Any party — including retailers, agricultural enterprises, or members of the public — may make a voluntary contribution to the Fund. Voluntary contributors receive public recognition through a registry and may designate their contribution to a named sanctuary under subsection 6(d).

(d) Why "pennies" compounds — illustrative math. The strength of this structure is that no single unit is meaningfully burdened, yet aggregate volume produces a large dedicated fund. The following is illustrative arithmetic using round figures:

A two-cent levy on one dollar of covered product is $0.02 — imperceptible at the unit level.
Applied across an illustrative $2 billion in annual U.S. first-sale value of covered products, the levy yields $40 million per year.
Over a ten-year horizon, that compounds to $400 million — before any toxicity modulation, voluntary tier, or growth.
For scale calibration: this sits between California's mill assessment and EPA's $42 million-per-year FIFRA maintenance-fee target, and within an order of magnitude of France's EUR 180 million-per-year RPD — all existing, collected levies. The Pittman-Robertson excise, by comparison, now apportions $1.2 billion in a single year. The arithmetic of "small per unit, vast in aggregate" is not speculative; it is how every cited program already operates.

Section 6. The Pollinator Protection Fund

(a) Establishment. There is established in the Treasury a dedicated trust account, the Pollinator Protection Fund, into which all levy receipts, voluntary contributions, and associated interest shall be deposited. Following the Pittman-Robertson model, receipts are collected by the Treasury and deposited directly into the Fund — they do not pass through general appropriations.

(b) Administration. The Fund shall be administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in coordination with USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service and Farm Service Agency, drawing on the existing Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration apportionment apparatus and on USDA pollinator practice (CRP CP-42; EQIP wildlife-habitat set-asides).

(c) Allocation formula. Apportionment among the states shall follow a transparent statutory formula adapting the Pittman-Robertson approach — a blend of (i) each state's share of agricultural and natural pollinator habitat acreage and (ii) each state's documented pollinator need — with a floor ensuring no state receives less than 0.5 percent and a cap ensuring no state receives more than 5 percent of annual apportionment, so that small and large states alike participate. Projects shall operate on a cost-share basis modeled on Pittman-Robertson's 75/25 federal-state split, with non-federal match supplied by state, tribal, academic, or private partners.

(d) Per-sanctuary allocation. The Fund shall publish standardized per-sanctuary funding units so that contributors and legislators can see exactly what their dollars build. The following figures are illustrative, anchored to documented USDA incentive levels (CP-42 signing incentive up to $150/acre; performance incentive up to 40 percent of installation cost):

Establish a sanctuary (illustrative): approximately $25,000 to plant and establish a multi-species, bloom-continuous pollinator parcel meeting CP-42 standards.
Sustain a sanctuary (illustrative): approximately $5,000 per year in stewardship, monitoring, and re-seeding.
Under these illustrative figures, the $40 million-per-year yield modeled in Section 5(d) could establish on the order of 1,000 new sanctuaries in a single year, or establish several hundred while sustaining thousands already standing. Final per-unit costs shall be set by USDA cost data, not by this model.

Section 7. Non-Diversion (The Lock)

(a) Anti-diversion rule. No receipts of the Fund may be diverted to any purpose other than pollinator protection, habitat restoration, verification, and the administration of this Act. This provision is mandatory and adopts the Pittman-Robertson anti-diversion condition under which a state that diverts dedicated funds loses access to the program entirely.

(b) Permanence. Consistent with the Great American Outdoors Act (2020) treatment of LWCF, deposits to the Fund are mandatory and available without further appropriation. This section directly answers the Danish cautionary finding in Section 3(j): the earmark is locked in statute so it cannot be swept into general revenue.

Section 8. Verification and Accountability — Pay-for-Proof

(a) Outcome conditioning. Disbursements from the Fund shall be tied to measured ecological outcomes, not merely to activity. Eligible, verifiable metrics include:

Habitat acres established and maintained to CP-42 multi-species, bloom-continuous standard;
Colony health indicators, including overwinter survival measured against the federal sustainable-loss goal set in the 2015 National Strategy;
Pollinator abundance and diversity — documented increases in managed and wild pollinator counts on funded parcels ("bees up").

(b) Performance hold-back. A portion of each grant — illustratively up to 40 percent, mirroring the CP-42 performance-incentive structure — shall be released only upon third-party verification that outcome targets were met, so that public funds follow proof rather than promises.

(c) Public ledger. The Administrator shall maintain a public, machine-readable ledger of every dollar collected, every sanctuary funded, and every verified outcome, so that legislators, contributors, and the public can audit the Act's results in the open.

Section 9. Incentives — Reduce and Pay Less

Section 9. The levy is a floor that shrinks, not a penalty: the more a covered party cuts its bee-toxic use, the less it owes, until at full reduction (or voluntary direct funding) it approaches zero. The cheapest lawful path is the one that helps pollinators most. Slope and tiers are illustrative; the proportional mechanism follows Section 5(c).

The Act is deliberately structured so that the cheapest path for a covered party is to reduce its use of bee-toxic products. The Tier B reduced rate (Section 5(c)) lowers the per-unit charge in proportion to documented reduction; the toxicity bands (Section 5(b)) push the rate toward less harmful chemistry; and the voluntary tier (Section 5(c), Tier C) lets responsible actors fund recovery directly. The levy is a floor that shrinks as behavior improves — never a penalty for lawful conduct, always a nudge toward the ideal.

Section 10. Implementation and Phase-In

Section 10. Year 1 collects nothing — it publishes the toxicity schedule and stands up the public ledger. Year 2 phases in at a fraction; Year 3 onward runs the full rate with annual inflation indexation. Rates are illustrative; the staged ramp mirrors California's multi-year mill-assessment phase-up and France's annual revaluation.

Year 1 — Standing up. The Administrator publishes the Bee-Toxic Active Ingredient Schedule and toxicity bands, establishes the Fund account, and stands up the public ledger. No levy is collected in Year 1.
Year 2 — Phased rate. The levy takes effect at a fraction of the full illustrative rate, allowing covered parties to adjust, exactly as California phases its mill assessment upward over multiple years.
Year 3 and beyond — Full rate. The full rate and reduced-rate tiers take effect; annual indexation tracks inflation, following the French RPD's annual revaluation practice.
Updatable allocation. Allocation and incentive rules may be revised by statute without disturbing the underlying levy mechanism — as the 2019 Pittman-Robertson Modernization Act demonstrated when it updated fund uses while leaving the excise structure intact.

Section 11. Honest Note on This Proposal

Section 11. Nothing here is legally novel. Every load-bearing part — the per-unit levy, the toxicity-scaled rate, the locked fund, the apportionment formula, the cost-share, the anti-diversion lock, and pay-for-proof disbursement — already operates in U.S. or peer-nation law. The Act assembles proven parts toward one honest end.

This is a model proposal, not enacted law, and Apiary does not claim otherwise. Every rate, threshold, and per-sanctuary cost marked "illustrative" is exactly that — a placeholder showing how the arithmetic compounds, to be replaced by economic analysis and drafting counsel. What is not speculative is the structure: every component here — a per-unit levy on pesticide makers and sellers, a toxicity-modulated rate, a locked conservation fund, a state apportionment formula with floor and cap, a cost-share, an anti-diversion rule, and outcome-conditioned disbursement — already operates in U.S. or peer-nation law. This Act assembles proven parts toward one honest end: while bee-toxic pesticide use continues, the units sold should help pay, at a rate barely felt per unit, to bring the pollinators back.

Glossary. Pittman-Robertson Act (1937): the U.S. law taxing firearms/ammunition manufacturers to fund wildlife restoration — the template for this Act. Mill assessment: California's per-dollar pesticide-sales levy. FIFRA / PRIA: the federal pesticide registration law and fee act under which makers already pay per-product fees. RPD: France's toxicity-modulated pesticide levy earmarked to biodiversity. CP-42: USDA's pollinator-habitat conservation practice setting the multi-species, bloom-continuity sanctuary standard. Pay-for-proof: releasing funds only when measured ecological outcomes are verified.

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The Pollinator Protection & Restoration Act — a model bill