- calendar_today August 27, 2025
The ESA, which dates to 1973, has been under repeated attack since January. Trump and his officials say the law is too strict and rules prevent development, blocking what the president often calls “energy domination.” This year’s executive orders direct agencies to rewrite ESA regulations in a way that could speed up fossil fuel projects, skirting the environmental reviews they now face.
Burgum and other conservatives argue that the law is broken and that its strict rules do little to drive species recovery. Experts say the opposite is true: the problem is decades of underfunding and inconsistent political will.
“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”
A History of Prevention, Not Recovery
The ESA’s main goal is to prevent species from reaching the brink of extinction, and experts say that’s one of its greatest strengths. Since 1973, only 26 listed species have gone extinct while under federal protection. In the same time, at least 47 have been declared extinct while still awaiting listing, according to an analysis by Yale Law School.
“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” Wilcove said. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”
One of the law’s most celebrated success stories is the bald eagle. A combination of habitat loss and the pesticide DDT left just a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in the 1960s. Banning DDT and the bird’s 1978 listing under the ESA allowed numbers to climb. In 2007, the bald eagle was removed from the endangered list, with nearly 10,000 nesting pairs across the country.
American alligators and Steller sea lions are among other species that have made a dramatic recovery from the brink.
Private Land Politics
ESA protections are for plants and animals on public and private property alike, creating a long history of conflict. More than two-thirds of listed species live on private lands, with about 10 percent living only on them.
“You essentially can’t develop those lands,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor of environmental law at William & Mary. “Your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted. That discourages landowners from cooperating.”
The result, some studies have suggested, are “perverse incentives.” For instance, research on red-cockaded woodpeckers showed timber was logged early in places with the birds, presumably to head off federal habitat restrictions.
Congress has created incentives for landowners over the years, including tax breaks and conservation easements which give landowners money to help them conserve and protect habitat. Those programs have been shrinking in recent years, conservationists worry.
ESA’s Uncertain Future
In the 1970s and ‘80s, the ESA was a bipartisan cause. Since then, however, the law has been one of the most litigated in American environmental history, with several administrations—including Bush’s—attempting to weaken its protections. Each rollback was reversed when political leadership changed.
In recent years, experts say, the Trump administration’s aggressive dismantling of environmental protections combined with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court may provide a real, permanent chance to curb the ESA’s reach. Meanwhile, climate change and habitat destruction continue to push more species to crisis point.
Andrew Mergen, a law professor at Harvard who spent two decades litigating ESA cases for government agencies, says the focus should be on providing more resources, not rolling back the law. “The law has worked to prevent extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is whether we’re going to commit enough resources and political will to help species recover, not whether we’re going to dismantle the basic protections that keep them from disappearing.”
A Tale of Hope
The political fighting over the ESA has had a winner, at least for now: the Roanoke logperch. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it has recovered enough to come off the endangered list. Burgum called it “proof” that the ESA is no longer a “Hotel California.”
The story behind the fish’s recovery, conservationists point out, is more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration and other work, as well as a costly effort to reintroduce fish into suitable habitat, started long before Trump took office.
“The optimistic part,” Wilcove said, “is we know how to save species if we’re willing to invest in them. The question is whether we’ll make that commitment.”
