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fish and wildlife service
Trump Proposal to Weaken Endangered Species Act Will 'Accelerate the Extinction Crisis,' Green Groups Warn
The proposal "could seal the fate of animals that, without these protections, would disappear from the Earth," said the Sierra Club’s executive director.
Nov 19, 2025
Environmentalists are sounding the alarm about a slate of new proposals from the Trump administration to weaken the Endangered Species Act, which they say will put more imperiled species in danger to line the pockets of the wealthy.
On Wednesday, the Department of the Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that it would once again roll back several key provisions of the ESA. Many had been in place for decades before they were slashed during President Donald Trump's first term. They were then restored under former President Joe Biden.
"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," said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a billionaire ally of the fossil fuel industry.
But some of the nation's leading environmental groups say the proposals will allow the government to flout science and approve new projects that will destroy the habitats of vulnerable creatures and accelerate the already worsening extinction crisis.
“The ESA is one of the world’s most powerful laws for conservation and is responsible for keeping 99% of listed species from extinction,” said Jane Davenport, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife.
The group said the changes "could accelerate the extinction crisis we face today." According to a 2023 investigation by the Montana Free Press, the ESA has prevented 291 species from going extinct since it was passed in 1973. At that point, around 40% of all animals and 34% of plants were considered at risk of extinction according to NatureServe, a nonprofit that collects conservation data.
“The ESA is only as effective as the regulations that implement it," Davenport said. “Rolling back these regulations risks reversing the ESA’s historic success and threatens the well-being of plant and animal species that pollinate our crops, generate medicine, keep our waterways clean, and support local economies.”
One of the rules being rolled back requires species to receive "blanket" protections when they are added to the list of threatened species. Instead of those blanket protections—which protect these newly-added species from killing, trapping, and other forms of harm—the FWS will instead create individual designations for each species.
According to Jackson Chiappinelli, a spokesperson for Earthjustice, some of the species that would lose protection under this rule would be the Florida manatee, California spotted owl, greater sage grouse, and monarch butterfly, which it said could remain unprotected for years after being listed.
Another major change would let the government consider "economic impacts" when deciding which habitats are required to be protected. In 1982, Congress modified the ESA to clarify that the secretary of the interior must make decisions "solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available," an amendment specifically intended to prevent economic factors from overawing environmental concerns.
The Interior Department said "the revised framework provides transparency and predictability for landowners and project proponents while maintaining the service’s authority to ensure that exclusions will not result in species extinction."
But Chiappinelli contends that the change would "violate the letter of the law" and warns that "the federal government could decide against protecting an endangered species after considering lost revenue from prohibiting a golf course or hotel development to be built where the species lives."
"If finalized, the rules would bias listing decisions with unreliable economic analyses, obstruct the ability to list new protected species, and make it easier to remove those now on the federal endangered or threatened list," said Ian Brickey, a spokesperson for the Sierra Club.
The proposed rules would also reduce the requirements for other federal agencies to consult with wildlife agencies to determine whether their actions could harm critical habitats. It also eliminates the requirement for agencies to "offset" habitat damage when approving new projects, such as logging or drilling, that harm protected species.
“Without rigorous consultations,” Davenport said, “projects could push species like the northern spotted owl and Cook Inlet beluga whale closer to extinction.”
The new proposals follow several efforts by the Trump administration to weaken protections for endangered species. Earlier this year, it proposed weakening the half-century-old definition of what counts as "harm" to endangered species to exclude habitat destruction.
The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has proposed rescinding the 2001 "Roadless Rule," which has shielded nearly 45 million acres of protected national forest from logging, oil and gas drilling, and road construction.
Amid the government shutdown, the administration announced its intent to lay off more than 2,000 Interior Department employees, including 143 from the FWS, though a federal judge blocked those layoffs.
It also attempted to sneak a provision into July's One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have mandated the sale of millions of acres of public lands, but it was stripped out in the Senate following fierce backlash.
"The Trump administration is stopping at nothing in its quest to put corporate polluters over people, wildlife and the environment," said Loren Blackford, the Sierra Club's executive director. "These regulations attempt to undermine the implementation of one of America’s bedrock environmental laws, and they could seal the fate of animals that, without these protections, would disappear from the Earth."
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Lead Ammo Harms Wildlife and Undermines the Mission of Our National Parks
Banning lead from our national parks would be one of the single biggest conservation advances in a generation.
Aug 27, 2024
Earlier this month, a California condor, the first of its kind to hatch and take flight in Zion National Park, died of lead poisoning just shy of its fifth birthday. Shockingly, one of this condor’s siblings was earlier found to have the highest recorded lead value ever documented in a live bird over the entire 28-year history of the condor release program.
Lead poisoning remains the leading cause of diagnosed death among California condors. About 90% of condors trapped and tested during this past year had blood lead levels indicating lead exposure. As scavengers, condors ingest lead shot from carcasses of animals killed with lead-based ammunition.
But condors are not the only victims. Lead is a leading threat to all national park birdlife, especially bald eagles, hawks, and other raptors. Lead fragments from spent shells contaminate the entire wildlife food chain.
It’s time for decisive action to protect the wildlife that our national parks were created to preserve.
While most parks by law do not permit hunting, a significant number do. Of the 429 national parks, 76 allow various types of hunting—recreational, subsistence, or tribal hunting. These parks (the largest of which are in Alaska) cover more than 60% of land within the entire national park system. In addition, more than 85% of parks with fish (213 in all) are open for fishing with lead tackle.
The impact is devastating. More than 130 park wildlife species are exposed to or killed by ingesting lead or prey contaminated with lead.
These wildlife deaths are preventable. Since November of 2022, Interior Secretary Deborah Haaland, the cabinet officer overseeing the National Park Service, has had a proposed rule sitting on her desk that would end the use of lead-based ammunition and fishing tackle in all park units. Despite this, no action has been taken on this rule-making petition.
In contrast to the Park Service’s total inaction, its sister agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, (FWS) has declared that “lead ammunition and tackle have negative impacts on both wildlife and human health.” The FWS has taken the first tentative steps to reduce or eliminate the use of lead ammunition by:
- Imposing partial bans on lead ammunition in certain refuges where new hunting opportunities have opened up;
- Phasing out of lead ammunition on three refuges newly opened to hunting; and
- Developing a pilot program to reimburse hunters for using lead-free ammunition.
Though these steps do not constitute a complete ban on lead ammunition, they represent a significant step forward, especially considering that nearly 80% of wildlife refuges and other management districts offer hunting and fishing access.
Unfortunately, wildlife protection does not appear to be a high priority for National Park Service Director Chuck Sams and his leadership team. Earlier this year, he approved questionable hunting practices, such as killing bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens, using dogs and artificial lights to hunt black bears, and shooting swimming caribou from motorboats across more than 22 million acres of Park Service administered lands in Alaska.
These are not the actions of a conservation-focused agency.
Banning lead from our national parks would be one of the single biggest conservation advances in a generation. Such a move would place the Park Service alongside 26 states and countries that have already banned lead ammunition.
The ecological stakes are profound. It’s time for decisive action to protect the wildlife that our national parks were created to preserve.
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US Government Sued Over 'Unethical Destruction' of Wolf Population
"The Fish and Wildlife Service is thumbing its nose at the Endangered Species Act and letting wolf-hating states sabotage decades of recovery efforts," said one conservation leader.
Apr 08, 2024
A pair of conservation coalitions on Monday made good on their threats to sue the U.S. government over its denial of federal protections for gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, where state killing regimes "put wolves at obvious risk of extinction in the foreseeable future."
The organizations filed notices of their plans for the lawsuits in early February, after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) determined that Endangered Species Act protections for the region's wolves were "not warranted." The Interior Department agency could have prevented the suits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana by reversing its decision within 60 days but refused to do so.
"The Biden administration and its Fish and Wildlife Service are complicit in the horrific war on wolves being waged by the states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana," declared George Nickas, executive director of Wilderness Watch, one of 10 organizations represented by the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC).
"Idaho is fighting to open airstrips all over the backcountry, including in designated wilderness, to get more hunters to wipe out wolves in their most remote hideouts," Nickas noted. "Montana is resorting to night hunting and shooting over bait and Wyoming has simply declared an open season."
"These states are destroying wolf families in the northern Rockies and cruelly driving them to functional extinction via bounties, wanton shooting, trapping, snaring, even running over them with snowmobiles."
Brooks Fahy, executive director of Predator Defense, another WELC group, pointed out that "these states are destroying wolf families in the northern Rockies and cruelly driving them to functional extinction via bounties, wanton shooting, trapping, snaring, even running over them with snowmobiles. They have clearly demonstrated they are incapable of managing wolves, only of killing them."
KC York, founder and president of Trap Free Montana, also represented by WELC, said that "Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming know that they were let off the hook in their brutal and unethical destruction of wolves even acknowledged as such by the service."
"They set the stage for other states to follow," York warned. "We are already witnessing the disturbing onset of giving the fox the key to the hen house and abandoning the farm. The maltreatment is now destined to worsen for these wolves and other indiscriminate species, through overt, deceptive, well-orchestrated, secretive, and legal actions."
The other organizations in the WELC coalition are Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Clearwater, International Wildlife Coexistence Network, Nimiipuu Protecting Our Environment, Protect the Wolves, Western Watersheds Project, and WildEarth Guardians.
The second lawsuit is spearheaded by the Center for Biological Diversity, Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund, and Sierra Club, whose leaders took aim at the same three states for their wolf-killing schemes.
"The states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming act like it's 1880 with the most radical and unethical methods to kill as many wolves as possible in an effort to manage for bare minimum numbers," said Sierra Club northern Rockies field organizer Nick Gevock. "This kind of management is disgraceful, it's unnecessary, and it sets back wolf conservation decades, and the American people are not going to stand by and allow it to happen."
"Rather than allow states to cater to trophy hunters, trappers, and ranchers, the agency must ensure the preservation of wolves."
Margie Robinson, staff attorney for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States, stressed that "under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cannot ignore crucial scientific findings. Rather than allow states to cater to trophy hunters, trappers, and ranchers, the agency must ensure the preservation of wolves—who are vital to ensuring healthy ecosystems—for generations to come."
The Center for Biological Diversity's carnivore conservation program director, Collette Adkins, was optimistic about her coalition's chances based on previous legal battles, saying that "we're back in court to save the wolves and we'll win again."
"The Fish and Wildlife Service is thumbing its nose at the Endangered Species Act and letting wolf-hating states sabotage decades of recovery efforts," Adkins added. "It's heartbreaking and it has to stop."
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