Gone With a Pen Stroke
The Record Series, Part 2 of 8: The Endangered Species Act has survived five decades of political pressure. What two Trump terms have done to it is something different.
The Endangered Species Act was signed into law in December 1973 by Richard Nixon. It passed the Senate 92-0 and the House 390-12. It was not a partisan document. It was a recognition, written into federal statute, that the United States had an obligation not to let its wildlife disappear.
For 50 years, it survived. It recovered the bald eagle, the American alligator, the gray wolf, the peregrine falcon, the humpback whale. It is imperfect, underfunded, and perpetually under political pressure. But it has kept roughly 99 percent of the species listed under it from going extinct.
What the Trump administration has done to it across two terms is not a policy disagreement about regulatory burden. It is a systematic dismantling of the law’s core mechanisms, piece by piece, using every available tool: rulemaking, agency pressure, executive order, and a rarely used committee that has the legal authority to condemn a species to extinction. That committee was used in March 2026 for only the third time in its nearly 50-year history.
This is the record.
First Term: The 2019 Overhaul
In August 2019, the Trump administration finalized what conservation groups and legal scholars called the most significant weakening of the Endangered Species Act since it was passed in 1973. The changes were sweeping, the public comment period was just 90 days, and zero public hearings were held despite nearly one million Americans submitting comments in opposition.
What the 2019 Rules Changed
Made it harder to protect species impacted by climate change by restricting the use of future projections when evaluating threats to a species
Allowed economic analyses to influence listing decisions, something the original law explicitly prohibited
Reduced automatic protections for threatened species, creating a tiered system where newly listed threatened species no longer received the same baseline protections as endangered ones
Narrowed the definition and process for designating critical habitat, making it easier to exclude areas developers wanted
Weakened the Section 7 interagency consultation process, raising the evidentiary standard agencies had to meet before concluding that a federal project might harm a listed species
Added a provision allowing the government to consider the economic cost of listing a species, a change critics called a fundamental corruption of the law’s intent
139 members of the House and Senate sent formal letters of protest. It did not matter. The rules were finalized and took effect.
What Courts Did With Them
The legal fight was long and the outcomes were significant. In March 2026, a federal judge in the Northern District of California struck down four of six challenged first-term ESA regulations, finding them both inconsistent with the statute and arbitrary and capricious. The court rejected a heightened evidentiary standard the Trump administration had added for evaluating whether federal projects were likely to harm listed species, restoring the lower threshold the law had used for decades. After seven years of litigation, the regulations were ordered vacated.
The administration’s response was not to accept the court’s ruling. It was to propose new rules designed to accomplish the same outcomes through different legal mechanisms, this time using the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright decision, which eliminated Chevron deference, as justification for reinterpreting the statute from scratch.
Second Term: The Word That Holds Everything Together
On April 17, 2025, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed rescinding the regulatory definition of a single word: harm.
That word has been the foundation of habitat protection under the Endangered Species Act for more than 40 years. Under the current definition, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995, ‘harm’ includes ‘significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife.’ That definition is what makes it illegal to bulldoze a wetland, drain a prairie, or clear-cut a forest if doing so would kill or injure a listed species.
The proposed rule would remove that definition entirely. Under what the administration is proposing, a ‘take’ of an endangered species would require, in their own words, ‘an affirmative act directed immediately and intentionally against a particular animal.’ In plain language: you would have to directly and deliberately kill the animal. Destroying the only forest it needs to survive would no longer count.
Cornell wildlife policy professor Dr. Steve Osofsky put the practical consequence as plainly as anyone: if you bulldoze the last breeding ground of a prairie chicken, the birds cannot mate. No individual bird was touched. Under the proposed rule, no law would have been broken.
Habitat destruction is not a peripheral threat to endangered species. It is the primary one. An independent 2022 study found that 88.3 percent of species on the IUCN Red List were impacted by habitat destruction, and that it was the main factor pushing 71.3 percent of them toward extinction. In 2023, FWS delisted 21 species from the ESA due to extinction. Habitat destruction was the primary factor in each case.
232,000 Americans submitted public comments opposing the proposed rule before the comment period closed in May 2025. The administration is reviewing them. A final rule has not yet been issued, which means this fight is ongoing and the outcome is not settled.
🔸 Status as of May 2026:
The ‘harm’ redefinition is proposed, not yet finalized. It is still in play. Conservation organizations are preparing legal challenges for when it is.
March 31, 2026: The God Squad
The Endangered Species Committee has existed since 1978. It is a panel of seven high-ranking federal officials with the authority to grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act, up to and including exemptions that would allow the extinction of a listed species to proceed. Conservation advocates call it the God Squad because that is effectively what it can do.
It has been used twice in its nearly 50-year history prior to 2026. The first time was 1979, for an Oregon dam. The second was 1992, for timber sales in spotted owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Both were legally contested and neither resulted in a clean industry win.
On March 31, 2026, the Trump administration convened it for the third time, and used it to exempt all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act, permanently and without limitation.
What Actually Happened in That Room
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requested the exemption, citing ‘urgent national security’ concerns. His stated basis was that environmental lawsuits aimed at protecting Gulf species were threatening to slow oil and gas production, and that constituted a national security emergency. The vote was taken after approximately 15 minutes of discussion. There was no deliberation. High-ranking officials read scripted remarks. A voice vote was taken. The exemption passed unanimously.
Defenders of Wildlife president and CEO Andrew Bowman described it as ‘a farcical piece of political theater.’ Conservation law expert Jared Davenport was blunt: ‘Let me just be really clear. There’s zero of the conditions they would need to meet in order to tee up a lawful vote.’
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, led 26 senators in launching a formal investigation into the vote, citing failures to meet the hearing and documentation prerequisites required by law before the God Squad can legally convene.
What Was Actually Exempted
The Gulf of Mexico is home to 20 threatened and endangered species. The exemption strips ESA protections from all of them as they relate to oil and gas activity. The species affected include:
Five species of sea turtles
Manatees
Endangered sperm whales
Manta rays
The Rice’s whale
The Rice’s whale deserves particular attention. NOAA scientists estimate approximately 50 of these baleen whales remain in existence. All of them live in the Gulf of Mexico year-round. They have no other habitat. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, which occurred outside their core habitat, killed approximately 17 percent of the population in a single event. The exemption removes the speed restrictions and seismic survey limits that were in place specifically to protect them from ongoing oil and gas activity.
To be precise about what this means: there are 50 Rice’s whales left. They all live in one place. The administration has removed the legal requirement for oil and gas companies to avoid killing them. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a decision about whether a species survives.
The Legal Challenge
Defenders of Wildlife, NRDC, and other conservation organizations filed petitions for review of the God Squad vote in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The ESA’s framework includes a judicial review provision specifically for God Squad decisions, so the legal path exists. The outcome is not guaranteed. The court that will hear it has been reshaped by Trump appointments.
The Gulf of Mexico produces about 15 percent of total U.S. crude oil and about 2 percent of total U.S. dry natural gas, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The ESA, according to Defenders of Wildlife, has not slowed a single barrel of oil from being extracted from the Gulf. The ‘national security emergency’ was a pretext. The exemption was the point.
Species-Specific Losses Across Both Terms
Gray Wolf
The first Trump administration attempted to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Courts blocked it in 2022. The second term’s FWS announced it would not write a recovery plan for gray wolves, effectively abandoning the legal obligation to work toward their conservation even while they remain listed. Legislation to formally delist gray wolves is moving through Congress.
Grizzly Bear
The second term moved to remove the grizzly bear from the endangered species list, implementing a specific Project 2025 recommendation. FWS proposed delisting in 2025.
Greater Sage-Grouse
The greater sage-grouse was deemed eligible for ESA listing in the early 2010s due to precipitous population declines. To avoid the listing, the federal government and Western states developed collaborative land management plans in 2015 balancing drilling and ranching access against habitat protections. The second Trump term has moved to gut those plans, implementing a Project 2025 recommendation to remove the habitat protections that were the entire basis for keeping the bird off the ESA list in the first place.
Northern Spotted Owl
Protections reduced under the first Trump term. Partially reversed by Biden in 2021. Vulnerable again under the second term’s broader ESA rollback agenda.
Zero New Species Protected
During the second Trump term, not a single new species has received ESA protections. Not one listing. In a country where the extinction crisis is accelerating, where habitat loss is the primary driver, and where the government’s own scientists are documenting population collapses across hundreds of species, the administration’s response has been to stop listing entirely while simultaneously proposing to remove the legal definition that makes habitat protection possible.
The backlog of species awaiting listing decisions grows longer. Each one that waits is a species without protection while the administration works to make protection harder to obtain and easier to remove.
What This Means in Practice
It is worth being specific about what happens when these mechanisms work together, because each one sounds abstract until you put them in sequence.
A developer wants to build a data center on habitat used by a listed species. Under current law, they cannot destroy that habitat because doing so would ‘harm’ the species, which is a prohibited ‘take’ under the ESA. The interagency consultation process requires the relevant federal agencies to evaluate whether the project will harm listed species before approving permits. If it will, the project must be modified or denied.
Now remove the ‘harm’ definition. Destroying the habitat is no longer a ‘take.’ The consultation process has less to evaluate. The species loses its primary protection.
Now gut FWS staff, as the second term has done, cutting 18 percent of the agency. The biologists who would evaluate consultation requests are gone. Reviews take longer or do not happen. Permits get approved by default.
Now exempt the Gulf from the ESA entirely via the God Squad, establishing a precedent that ‘national security’ can be invoked to remove protections anywhere, at any time, for any industry with the right access.
None of these steps, taken individually, sounds like the end of the Endangered Species Act. Taken together, they are.
🔸 What you can do:
Support Earthjustice, Defenders of Wildlife, NRDC, and the Center for Biological Diversity, all of which are actively litigating these rollbacks.
Contact your U.S. Senators and Representatives specifically about the ‘harm’ definition proposed rule and the God Squad vote investigation. The ‘harm’ rule is not yet final: public pressure on Congress matters right now.
THE RECORD continues in Part 3: Selling the Land
What This Series Covers
Over the next six parts, WildTomorrow will document the specific categories of damage across both Trump terms in detail:
Part 3: Public lands, national monuments, and the selling of Bears Ears, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and 88 million acres of protected land
Part 4: National parks hunting rollbacks, including what changed at Lake Meredith in Texas and across 55 federal sites
Part 5: The gutting of FWS, NOAA, and EPA, and what the loss of scientific capacity means in practice
Part 6: Clean water, wetlands, and the WOTUS rollback threatening up to 91 percent of U.S. wetlands
Part 7: Climate rollbacks, the endangered finding repeal, and the fossil fuel subsidy machine
Part 8: The full reckoning, what was undone, what may never be recovered, and what you can do
This is not a partisan document. It is a factual one. The record exists. These parts of it belong together.
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