The Trump administration moved Wednesday to weaken the popular Endangered Species Act in an attempt to restore changes made during the president’s first term that were later blocked by a federal judge.
The proposed changes include the elimination of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “blanket rule” that automatically protects animals and plants when they are classified as threatened. Government agencies instead would have to craft species-specific rules for protections, a potentially lengthy process.
The administration’s announcement answers long-standing calls for revisions to the 1973 Endangered Species Act from Republicans in Congress and industries including oil and gas, mining and agriculture. Critics argue the law has been wielded too broadly, to the detriment of economic growth.
But environmentalists warned the changes could cause yearslong delays in efforts to save species such as the monarch butterfly, the Florida manatee, the California spotted owl and the North American wolverine.
“They’re trying to take us back to the first time they weakened the law,” said Rebecca Riley, managing director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We fought that, and the Biden administration reversed many of the worst changes they made, and they are moving to put them back in place.”
Scientists and government agencies say extinctions have accelerated globally because of habitat loss and other pressures. Prior proposals during Trump’s second term would revise the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act and potentially bypass species protections for logging projects in national forests and on public lands.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement that the administration was restoring the Endangered Species Act to its original intent while respecting “the livelihoods of Americans who depend on our land and resources.”
“These revisions end years of legal confusion and regulatory overreach, delivering certainty to states, tribes, landowners and businesses while ensuring conservation efforts remain grounded in sound science and common sense,” he said.
Another change proposed Wednesday tasks officials with weighing possible economic impacts in deciding what habitat is critical to the survival of a species, which environmental groups say is expressly prohibited by the 1973 law.
In practice, that could lead to species' being listed as endangered while allowing practices that further threaten their survival to continue.
“What the Trump administration is trying to do is add that in, so say you’re protecting the spotted owl — how much will that cost? They’re trying to force that into consideration, which up until this point has not been part of decisions to protect species for critical habitat,” said Noah Greenwald, co-director for the endangered species program at the Center for Biological Diversity.
The case of the Yarrow’s spiny lizard in the Southwest exemplifies the potential consequences of the administration’s proposals. Rapidly warming temperatures have ravaged a population of the lizard in Arizona’s Mule Mountains, pushing the reptiles farther up the mountainsides toward the highest peaks and possibly toward extinction.
A petition filed Wednesday seeks protections for the lizard and the designation of critical habitat. Advocates say analyzing the economic impacts could delay protections. Designating critical habitat could be another hurdle because the primary threat to this population of spiny lizard is climate change.
“We think that the species should be listed as endangered. In fact, we are somewhat shocked that it is not already extinct,” said John Wiens, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, who co-authored the petition.
The Interior Department was sued over the blanket protection rule in March by the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. The two groups argued the rule was illegal and that it discouraged states and landowners from assisting in species recovery efforts.
Species designated as “threatened” under the blanket rule automatically qualify for the same protections as those with the more severe designation of “endangered.” That could cause landowners to become indifferent to a species’ fate, because even if they work to get an endangered species downgraded to threatened, there might not be a lessening of government restrictions.
PERC Vice President Jonathan Wood said Wednesday’s proposal was a “necessary course correction” from the Biden administration’s actions.
“This reform acknowledges the blanket rule’s unlawfulness and puts recovery back at the heart of the Endangered Species Act,” Wood said.
Trump officials during his first term also rolled back protections for individual species, including the northern spotted owl and the gray wolf.
The spotted owl decision was reversed in 2021 after officials said Trump’s political appointees used faulty science to justify opening millions of acres of West Coast forest to potential logging. Protections for wolves across most of the U.S. were restored by a federal court in 2022.
The five-decade old Endangered Species Act remains broadly popular. A review of polling this year found as many as 84% of Americans favor the law’s protections.
