"Congressional Republicans also plan to turn the Endangered Species Act into a dead letter."
"For more than 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has helped scores of species — from whooping cranes to red wolves to California condors — claw their way back from the edge of extinction. Its success has made it supremely popular with the American public — far more popular, for instance, than Congress. But now, like all those species it helps protect, the law itself is in grave peril. The Trump administration, Congress, and their allies have launched a barrage of legislation, litigation and regulatory maneuvers in recent months that together could tear the teeth out of our most powerful wildlife conservation statute.
If these efforts succeed, they will “take away most of our regulatory power for most species,” said a source inside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is one of the key agencies that administers the Endangered Species Act, or ESA.
The most pressing of these proposals emanates from the Department of the Interior, where Trump appointees are seeking to effectively eliminate one of the most expansive safeguards for threatened and endangered species. The administration is gunning for Section 9 of the ESA, a load-bearing legal provision which makes it illegal for any person or entity to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” an endangered species. The Trump administration’s new proposal focuses on only one of the words listed above — “harm.” What does it mean to harm an endangered species?
Given that habitat degradation and loss is the largest single driver of species extinction, the government has long applied the ESA’s prohibition against harm to imperiled animals as well as their habitat. Federal regulations specifically include in their interpretation of harm those actions that cause “significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.” This has empowered the Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies to combat habitat destruction. If you cut down a forest that endangered bats rely on to roost, then you may be harming that species and breaking the law. If you build a dam that drowns endangered salmon habitat, ditto. If you build a subdivision in forests where Florida panthers breed, you may be in violation of the ESA. Punching an endangered animal in the face would run afoul of Section 9. But wiping out endangered species habitat is harm too and more enduring harm at that."
Jimmy Tobias reports for Public Domain May 15, 2025.
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