On Wednesday the Trump Administration resurrected a policy to overhaul the Endangered Species Act that many in the hunting and fishing community say not only further imperils sensitive species, but could also lead to more regulation.
The proposal comes with four major changes to the current ESA including requiring the government to consider the economic impact of listing a species, lessening reliance on future effects like climate change, and removing blanket protections for threatened species.
“We are moving away from good ideas for wildlife conservation and toward ideas that are not as supportive of species at a time when a lot of species are in big trouble,” says Mike Leahy, the National Wildlife Federation’s senior director of wildlife, hunting, and fishing policy.
Industry-backed groups say the changes are needed for more development and will lessen the burden of lawsuits and regulations that often inevitably appear with endangered species listings. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says in a release that the proposed changes, which were announced in Trump’s first presidency before being rolled back during the Biden administration, will “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.”
The changes are part of an increasingly vocal call to adapt — or in some cases even scrap — the ESA, which became law under Richard Nixon in 1973. Some species, like the grizzly bear and gray wolf, have been mired in lawsuits for years despite reaching their original population goals for a relisting. That’s why oil, gas drillers, housing developers and loggers aren’t the only people who have advocated for changes. Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman even proposed a bill in March that would have made law many of the proposed rule changes.
But some changes, like telling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service it must consider lost revenue before listing a species, might make sense on paper, could be a potential disaster in practicality, leading ESA historian, lawyer, and conservationist Lowell Baier told Outdoor Life earlier this year.
“That’s absolutely terrible because it will bring all the bugs out of the woodwork. In other words, people who have those species on their ground will fight tooth and nail and throw up every economic excuse in the book as to how that will damage or affect them personally,” Baier said at the time. “… The ESA has always been based on science, and science alone. And this reverses that.”
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists should also not be tasked with disseminating future economic data, Leahy says.
The same goes for a proposal that would change protections offered to threatened species. Right now, if a species is listed as threatened (but not yet endangered), the Fish and Wildlife Service gives it blanket baseline protections. Ideally the Fish and Wildlife Service then follows up with a species-specific protection plan, Leahy says. But Service biologists are notoriously overworked and understaffed, and as a result many of the threatened species on the list don’t have their own individual plans. The current proposal says for future listings, until a threatened species has its own protections, it will receive no protections.
Threatened species “don’t need the same level of protection as endangered species, and could even be hunted or fished if those activities aren’t a threat,” Leahy says. “But they need some baseline protections so they don’t get worse, and maybe become endangered, while waiting for their own rule which may never come given how short-staffed the US Fish and Wildlife Service is becoming.”
The public has 30 days to comment on the rule, though Leahy expects the changes to become official. The result won’t, however, just impact little-known plant and animal species that few people see or care about.
Critical habitat conserved by the ESA often helps hundreds if not thousands of species aside from the ones directly protected.
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“We as hunters don’t always love the red tape and bureaucracy and litigation,” Leahy says. “But at the end of the day, hunting and fishing is based on conservation of wildlife and habitats and that’s what endangered species recovery is all about, too.”
Of all the species ever listed by the ESA, noted the USFWS in 2021, 99 percent have avoided extinction. Recovered species include the Columbian white-tailed deer, the bald eagle, the Louisiana black bear, and gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, to name a few.
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