On June 20, 2014, President Obama signed a presidential memorandum creating a federal Pollinator Health Task Force, co-chaired by the Secretary of Agriculture and the EPA Administrator, and gave it exactly 180 days to produce a national strategy for saving honey bees and other pollinators — a deadline that put a hard number on what had, until then, been treated mostly as an open-ended scientific and industry problem. It remains one of the few times pollinator decline has been treated as a coordinated, cross-agency federal priority rather than left to USDA research programs and state agriculture departments working largely on their own.
Key Takeaways
- President Obama’s June 20, 2014 memorandum, “Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators,” established the Pollinator Health Task Force.
- The Task Force was co-chaired by the Secretary of Agriculture and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, with representatives from more than a dozen additional federal departments and agencies.
- The memorandum gave the Task Force 180 days to produce a National Pollinator Health Strategy, which was released in May 2015 and included a dedicated Pollinator Research Action Plan and Public Education Plan.
- The initiative’s stated economic justification cited honey bee pollination alone as adding more than $15 billion in value to U.S. agricultural crops annually.
- A follow-up Pollinator Partnership Action Plan was published in June 2016, continuing the Task Force’s coordinated implementation work beyond the initial strategy document.
Table of Contents
- The June 2014 Memorandum
- Who Actually Sat on the Task Force
- 180 Days to a National Strategy
- The $15 Billion Number Behind the Urgency
- What Happened After the Strategy Shipped
- Frequently Asked Questions
The June 2014 Memorandum
On June 20, 2014, President Obama issued a presidential memorandum titled “Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators.” The memorandum didn’t itself set new regulations or spending; what it did was formally establish a Pollinator Health Task Force and direct it to produce a coordinated federal response to what had, by 2014, become an increasingly visible and economically worrying pattern of honey bee colony losses — a crisis this site has covered separately in its history of Colony Collapse Disorder. Rather than leaving the response to USDA research programs alone, the memorandum treated pollinator health as a genuinely cross-government problem requiring coordination across agencies with very different core missions.
Who Actually Sat on the Task Force
The Task Force was structured with two co-chairs: the Secretary of Agriculture and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency — a deliberate pairing, since USDA’s core interest in pollinator health is agricultural and economic while EPA’s is tied to pesticide regulation, and honey bee decline sits squarely at the intersection of both. Beyond the co-chairs, the memorandum directed heads (or their designated representatives) from more than a dozen additional federal executive departments, agencies, and offices to participate, reflecting how many different parts of the federal government touch land use, chemical regulation, agricultural policy, or research funding relevant to pollinator health.
180 Days to a National Strategy
The memorandum’s most concrete instruction was a deadline: the Task Force had 180 days to develop a National Pollinator Health Strategy, complete with explicit goals, milestones, and metrics for measuring progress — language specifically intended to prevent the effort from producing a vague, unenforceable set of aspirations. The resulting strategy was published in May 2015, built around several components, most notably a Pollinator Research Action Plan directing federal research priorities and a Public Education Plan aimed at improving public understanding of pollinator decline and what non-specialists could do about it.
The $15 Billion Number Behind the Urgency
The Task Force’s own justification for treating pollinator decline as a serious federal priority leaned heavily on a single economic figure: honey bee pollination alone was cited as adding more than $15 billion in value to United States agricultural crops every year. That number is worth sitting with, because it reframes the entire initiative — this wasn’t primarily an effort to protect honey bees as a matter of environmental sentiment, but a response to a recognized, quantified risk to a specific, multi-billion-dollar slice of the agricultural economy that depends on adequate pollination services being available every growing season.
What Happened After the Strategy Shipped
The Task Force’s work didn’t end with the May 2015 strategy document. A follow-up Pollinator Partnership Action Plan was published in June 2016, continuing the coordination effort into implementation rather than treating the initial strategy as a one-time deliverable. The broader institutional model the 2014 memorandum established — a standing, cross-agency task force rather than a single agency acting alone — represents a genuinely different approach to pollinator policy than the decades of USDA-centered research funding that preceded it, even though evaluating its long-term on-the-ground impact on colony loss rates is a separate, more complicated question than describing what the initiative itself was structured to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the Pollinator Health Task Force created?
President Obama established it through a presidential memorandum signed on June 20, 2014, titled “Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators.”
Who led the Pollinator Health Task Force?
It was co-chaired by the Secretary of Agriculture and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, with participation from representatives of more than a dozen additional federal departments and agencies.
What did the Task Force actually produce?
A National Pollinator Health Strategy, released in May 2015 within the memorandum’s 180-day deadline, including a Pollinator Research Action Plan and a Public Education Plan, followed by a June 2016 Pollinator Partnership Action Plan.
Why did the federal government treat this as an economic issue?
The initiative’s own justification cited honey bee pollination as adding more than $15 billion in value to U.S. agricultural crops annually, framing pollinator decline as a direct risk to a significant and quantifiable part of the agricultural economy.
Is the Pollinator Health Task Force still active?
The task force structure and its 2015 strategy and 2016 action plan represent the core of this initiative’s documented output; evaluating any current, ongoing federal activity beyond those published documents falls outside the scope of this historical overview.
For additional context, see the National Park Service.
