How Republicans Are Trying to Gut the Endangered Species Act

Americans may not agree on much, but it seems fair to say that most are pretty happy that the bald eagle isn’t extinct. When the Senate passed the Endangered Species Act on a 92-0 vote in 1973, bald eagles were among the first on the protected list, their population having cratered to fewer than 450 nesting pairs by the early 1960s. Now delisted, bald eagles easily outnumber the population of St. Louis, Missouri, in 2026, at more than 300,000 individuals.

The Endangered Species Act remains enduringly popular more than 50 years later due to such success stories, with researchers finding in a 2018 survey that support for the legislation has “remained stable over the past two decades,” with only about one in 10 Americans opposing it. Even so, the law has long been controversial among industry groups because of the restrictions it imposes on development. In 2011, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, Congress introduced 30 bills to alter the ESA, then averaged around 40 per year through 2016.

“A lot of environmental laws have not been brought into the 21st century or modernized effectively,” Gabriella Hoffman, the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank that supports overhauling the legislation, told me. “It might sound counterintuitive, but a lot of us who are critical of the current iteration of the ESA want it to work.”

Other critics have argued that environmentalists and NIMBYs have weaponized the ESA to block infrastructure projects, including, in some cases, clean energy development, as we’ve covered extensively in The Fight. Kristen Boyles, the managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Northwest office, suggested, however, that pitting the ESA and wildlife protections against clean energy creates a false dichotomy. “I think there are very few examples of a species and a clean energy project collision that can’t be worked around,” she told me. “Most of the time, [the Endangered Species Act] is making sure that we have a process that respects both the web of life and the clean energy that we all want.”

This month, Republicans’ multi-pronged efforts to weaken the ESA are reaching a crescendo. In 2019, the Trump administration managed to push through the first major changes to the ESA in decades by finalizing rules that softened the protections for “threatened” species, expedited delisting plants and animals, and allowed new economic considerations such as lost revenue to be weighed alongside the benefits of protected status. Though President Biden walked back some of those changes when he took office, others remained in place until late last month, when a judge struck them down as in violation of both the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Now, however, the assaults are back. The House has been readying legislation that would have bypassed the regulatory pathway, codifying or expanding upon many of the changes made under Trump 1. The bill, H.R. 1897, was pulled from floor consideration at the last minute on Wednesday, apparently due to a lack of support.

“It just fell from its own weight,” Mary Beth Beetham, the director of legislative affairs at Defenders of Wildlife, told me afterward. “There is no way to fix this bill” — though in theory it could return to the schedule down the line.

However the Trump administration also submitted final rules with overlapping goals to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs earlier this month, which Boyles expects to see finalized any day now. The two-pronged approach gives Republicans multiple ways forward in their goals of overhauling the ESA by making it more deferential to industry — and less nimble in extending protections to species that may face accelerated threats like climate change.

Here’s a closer look at what’s happening.

The Regulatory Route to Undoing the ESA

Though not as durable as changes to the law itself, the regulatory route for amending the ESA is a quicker and faster-acting process. If legislation ever passes the House, it may still go nowhere in the Senate — or the upper chamber may choose to write its own version, which must then be reconciled. Rules can be challenged, but they also take effect immediately and remain in place until a lawsuit proves successful.

“It’s within the power of the executive branch,” Boyles explained. The Trump administration “can’t change the law because you’ve got to get Congress to do that, and it’s hard to get things passed through Congress” — as evidenced by Wednesday’s events on the House floor.

Though there are several pending final rules pertaining to the ESA under review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs tweaking critical habitat rules for animals such as the Canadian Lynx and various species of freshwater mussels, three in particular had environmentalists worried: “Rescinding the Definition of ‘Harm’ under the Endangered Species Act,” “Regulations Pertaining to Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants,” and “Regulations for Designating Critical Habitat.”

The first concerns the definition of the word “harm,” which is central to how the Endangered Species Act protects wildlife. The ESA specifically prohibits “harassing, harming, pursuing, hunting, shooting, wounding, killing, trapping, capturing, or collecting any of the listed species, or attempting to do so.” While words like “shooting” and “killing” are pretty unambiguous, “harming” has been defined by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service for decades as including modifications to habitat that negatively affect the protected species. “If you cut down the tree where the endangered bird lives, you haven’t actually shot the bird; you have just as clearly caused it not to survive because you’re cutting down the places it needs to live,” Boyles said.

Now, the FWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries have proposed final rules that would rescind their respective definitions of “harm.” The environmental groups I spoke with were dismissive of these proposals, given that the particular definition of “harm” had been challenged by the timber industry in 1995 and upheld by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 vote.

“When you look at something like the attempt to redefine ‘harm’ under the Endangered Species Act, an agency can’t do that,” Lisa Saltzburg, a senior attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, told me. “The law says what it says, and they can’t, by regulation, just get around that.”

Of greater concern to Boyles, at least, were the other two rules. The first, “Regulations Pertaining to Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants,” concerns the 4(d) rule, which extends blanket protections to animals and plants listed as “threatened.” The new version would repeal those automatic protections and instead require a separate rulemaking process for each animal listed as threatened, slowing the implementation of protections. “Listing is inherently urgent — that’s the gateway to protection,” Saltzburg said.

The other rule, “Regulations for Designating Critical Habitat,” pertains to the 4(b)(2) rule of the Endangered Species Act, which describes the Secretary of the Interior’s ability to exclude an area from a critical habitat designation if the economic, national security, or community benefits are deemed to outweigh the wildlife protections. The final rule now being weighed essentially creates a “framework biased toward exclusion,” its critics say.

The Legislative Route: H.R. 1897

Regulations are just one mechanism for altering the Endangered Species Act, though. The legislative route wouldn’t be vulnerable to a court’s determination that it is inconsistent with the law because it would be the law. Any legal challenge would have to prove that the law itself was unconstitutional, a higher bar to clear.

“The bill is just beyond bad,” Saltzburg, the senior attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, told me before it was pulled. Introduced as the ESA Amendments Act of 2025 by Arkansas Republican Bruce Westerman in March of last year, H.R. 1897 seeks to rename the Endangered Species Act the “Endangered Species Recovery Act,” which critics say underscores its priority of delisting animals and plants.

Hoffman, the director at IWF who supports the Republican amendments, told me the ESA has historically “prevented extinction, but it has not done a great job of the delisting part,” with only around 3% of the species that have been listed in the past half-century bouncing back to the point that, like the bald eagle, they can ultimately be removed. “You can even have certain production, you can have new projects, all the while balancing it out with ensuring that nobody is harmfully targeting imperiled species,” she said.

Supporters of the ESA, however, argue that the 3% statistic is misleading, given that most animals on the endangered species list haven’t been protected long enough for a full recovery — a 2016 study found that the average bird had been listed for 36 years, while their average federal recovery estimate was 63 years — and that the greater focus should be on its 99% success rate in preventing extinction.

Notably, H.R. 1897 would expand on the first Trump administration’s now-overturned rule, which permitted smaller habitat-damaging projects to go forward if they didn’t damage a habitat as a “whole.” The bill would make it more difficult for an area to qualify as critical habitat at all. It also eliminates FWS’s ability to require mitigation and offsets for unavoidable harm from projects. “These aren’t reforms to make the Endangered Species Act work better,” Boyles said. “They’re the same rollbacks that already got kicked out of court, now coming back dressed up as legislation.”

The bill would also make it more difficult to list species as endangered by adding administrative and procedural hurdles, such as mandatory economic analyses and multi-tiered work plans that must be submitted to Congress. The more than 1,700 domestic species covered by the ESA must be reviewed by FWS or NOAA every 5 years to determine whether their protected status remains appropriate; H.R. 1897 forces faster delistings by imposing a 30-day rulemaking window on already overburdened agencies once a decision is made, although the rules are complicated and, as it stands, can take years to finalize. FWS has lost 18% of its staff since the start of the second Trump administration and is already struggling with a backlog.

In a particularly pointed illustration of how H.R. 1897 would unwind preexisting safeguards, a federal court earlier this year voided a 2020 Florida wetlands permitting program for violating ESA protections for local wildlife. H.R. 1897 simply overrides the court by putting the state program into federal statute.

Boyles sounded doubtful when I asked for her read on the future of the bill, noting that it had been pulled from consideration a few weeks ago, too. “I have to assume that when members of Congress heard from their constituents, they decided this might not be the most pressing thing for them to do right now,” she said, adding, “I think this is House leadership recognizing they don’t have the votes and if they don’t have the votes, they’re not going to bring it up.”

But environmentalists won’t breathe easy before it’s officially dead. When I asked Saltzburg to speculate about the species that might not have made it this far if legislation like H.R. 1897 had passed two decades ago, she called the thought experiment “a nightmare to even imagine.”

“This isn’t about efficiency,” Saltzburg said. “It’s about inviting the extinction of species we’ve already proven we know how to save.”