Now that Donald Trump has reassumed the presidency of the United States, scientists and legal scholars are bracing for his potential dismantling of a host of the country’s most pivotal environmental and conservation-oriented policies. One of those, among many, is the Endangered Species Act.
Approved by Congress in 1973, the ESA directs the management of threatened and endangered species and has been a cornerstone of conservation in the United States. “It’s an incredibly powerful statute and among the strongest wildlife protection laws in the world,” says Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at the Vermont Law and Graduate School in South Royalton.
The first Trump administration severely weakened the law; the second seems poised to do so again, based on President Trump’s public comments. Here’s some key information about the ESA, and what experts will be monitoring in the opening salvos of Trump’s second administration.
What are the law’s strengths and limitations?
The ESA shifts the responsibility of managing threatened and endangered species from individual states to the federal government’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or USFWS, and the National Marine Fisheries Service. At its core, the ESA exists to curtail development or other activities that would harm at-risk species and to draft comprehensive plans for their recovery.
In this, the law has been highly effective: Of the more than 1,700 species protected under the ESA, an estimated 99 percent have stabilized or improved under the law’s protection, including 291 species that would have otherwise gone extinct.
Full implementation has been challenged, however, by a chronic lack of funding that amounts to just 3 percent of the $2.3 billion that is needed each year. Identifying conservation priorities is further complicated by the fact that the very definition of “species” is fuzzy, with dozens of definitions scattered throughout the literature. The ESA also includes designations for subspecies, and in the case of vertebrates, for distinct population segments that require additional protections.
“This question of what a species really is has always been relevant because the consequences of our choices have huge resource implications,” says Timothy Male, the executive director of the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in College Park, Md. “The errant protection of one species can eat up the recovery budgets for what could be hundreds of other successful conservation stories.”
This blurriness sometimes leads to cases of mistaken identity. In one recent study, researchers argue that the infamous snail darter — a roughly 8-centimeter-long fish at the heart of a 1978 Supreme Court case that first challenged the power of the ESA — is not actually a distinct species at all, but rather a population of the common stargazing darter. Some scientists now fear that the often-imprecise distinctions between species in the natural world could be used to undermine the scientific expertise that the ESA has relied on.
Biologists “made a good faith effort back then to describe the snail darter, but it just doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the 21st century,” says study coauthor Thomas Near, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University. “If they’d made a different call, perhaps we wouldn’t have spent as much on the conservation recovery of the snail darter.”
What can we expect based on the first Trump administration?
Legal scholars say the ESA is unlikely to be overturned outright — a process that would require an act of Congress — even as Republicans hold the presidency and both houses of Congress. There are several ways the new administration could change the language or enforcement of the law, however, many of which were leveraged during the first Trump presidency.
We can expect changes to the law’s language meant to defang it, says Patrick Parenteau, a retired legal scholar who litigated many of the early ESA court cases. In 2020, for example, President Trump changed how the law defines “critical habitat” to include only habitat currently occupied by a species, leaving little room for natural expansion as populations grow or the necessary movement of animals in response to climate change.
The first Trump administration also tweaked longstanding rules granting threatened species the same protections as endangered ones and made it easier to remove species from the endangered list. And in a break from past precedent, the administration mandated that ESA consultations include an economic impact assessment, despite the law’s original language specifying that species must be protected “regardless of economic consequence,” Parenteau says. “All of these rules, and more, are likely to return.” On his first day in office, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed six orders hinting as much.
The new administration may also choose to pull from Project 2025, a report widely considered to be an unofficial policy blueprint for the Republican party. Produced by a conservative think tank, the document supports ending reliance on species specialists — the scientists tasked with collecting and interpreting the data that informs ESA recommendations — due to their “obvious self-interest, ideological bias, and land-use agendas.”
“If you want to see how quickly that argument falls apart, let’s suggest that the next time someone needs cardiac surgery, we have a dentist to do it,” says J. Drew Lanham, a conservation biologist at Clemson University in South Carolina. “If we can’t depend on the specialists, who do we depend on?”
It’s also likely that Trump will attempt to resolve the longstanding puzzle of the grizzly bear, a conservation lightning rod that has stoked strong opposition among Republicans. As grizzly populations have rebounded, states where the bears live, including Montana and Wyoming, have petitioned the USFWS to delist the bears, at times seeking to press the issue through court orders. In January, the USFWS once again declined to delist grizzlies and instead introduced a plan to manage the six U.S. populations as a single collective.
With a new USFWS heading the discussions, however, it seems likely that a delisting based on political pressure, rather than science, is forthcoming, says Wesley Larson, a bear biologist who has helped manage populations of grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park. And once ESA protections are stripped away, Larson says, bears will quickly be hunted for sport.
“I do think this is an animal that has received the appropriate amount of protection from the Endangered Species Act, and I’d generally support delisting and see it as an absolute success,” he says. “However, I fear now that it’s going to be open season afterwards.”
What has happened so far?
On his first day in office, President Trump signed a flurry of executive orders withdrawing the United States from international climate pacts and rescinding financial commitments to address climate change. The administration pledged to refocus on traditional energy sources such as natural gas and coal and began weakening protections for sensitive habitats in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and the state of Alaska.
Two orders touched on the ESA.
The first allows the administration to expedite the law’s consultation process due to a “national energy emergency,” which Winders notes does not fall under the list of scenarios that typically allow fast-tracking. These have historically included “acts of God, disasters, casualties, national defense or security emergencies.” The directive also mandates quarterly meetings of the Endangered Species Committee, also known as the “God Squad,” which can override the ESA and authorize otherwise prohibited activities. This committee of high-ranking federal officials has exercised its power to overrule the law just three times. It succeeded twice: once in 1979, allowing the construction of a dam in Wyoming that threatened endangered whooping crane habitat, and once in 1992, to make allowances for logging activity that threatened the northern spotted owl.
The second order seeks to exert more control over water management in California, an issue over which President Trump has repeatedly clashed with the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. Recently, the President blamed the delta smelt, an endangered fish, for the lack of water needed to fight wildfires in Los Angeles, calling it an “essentially worthless fish.” The executive order seeks to override “disastrous California policies,” including the state’s own Endangered Species Act, which limits how much water can be pumped from sensitive habitats
Parenteau calls these moves “a tsunami of fossil-fueled bad ideas” that will usher the United States into “a dystopian world of environmental law.” Winders agrees, adding that “it’s hard to overstate the doom this spells.”
But Male says he’s trying to remain resolute, if not hopeful. Even as the United States falls behind, other countries have launched innovative conservation programs, including Australia’s nature repair market and a nature restoration law in countries that are part of the European Union. “Our fights here are over such silly and trivial things when there’s this massive biodiversity crisis going on,” he says. “If nothing else, it’s great that the rest of the world is moving ahead.”