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lauren boebert
Conservationists Sound Alarm as Republicans Take Aim at Endangered Species Act
"We are in a biodiversity crisis, and Congress is playing with fire," warned one wildlife defender. "These bills would accelerate extinction at a time when we can least afford it."
Mar 25, 2025
Green groups warned this week that a pair of Republican-led bills in the U.S. House of Representatives, including proposals to amend the Endangered Species Act and strip gray wolves of ESA protection, would, as Sierra Club said, "radically undercut the ability of the federal government to protect imperiled wildlife."
On Tuesday, the Republican-led House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries held legislative hearings on four bills, two of which involve the ESA.
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) said his ESA Amendments Act of 2025—which aims to streamline regulatory and permitting processes—is needed because "the Endangered Species Act has consistently failed to achieve its intended goals and has been warped by decades of radical environmental litigation into a weapon instead of a tool."
However, Sierra Club said Monday that the bill would "amend the ESA beyond recognition."
Congress is trying to kill the Endangered Species Act. New bill would amend iconic law's ability to protect wildlife. Today, a House committee held a hearing on a bill that would drastically limit the Endangered Species Act's ability to protect our country's imperiled wildlife.
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— Sierra Club (@sierraclub.org) March 25, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Earthjustice warned Tuesday that the legislation "would gut the critical protections that the ESA provides for thousands of imperiled species, upend the scientific consultation process (which has been the cornerstone of American species protection for 50 years), slow listings to a crawl while fast-tracking delistings, and allow much more exploitation of threatened species and shift their management out of federal hands to the states, even while they are still nationally listed."
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said that the second bill, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act of 2025—which she introduced in January with Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.)—would "remove the ability of progressive judges to get in the way of science and allow states to set their own rules and regulations for managing their gray wolf population" by delisting the species from the ESA within 60 days and prohibiting judicial review of the action.
During his first administration, U.S. President Donald Trumpdelisted gray wolves from the ESA across most of the country, a move that was reversed by a federal judge in 2022.
Defenders of Wildlife senior attorney Ellen Richmond said Monday that "this bill is deceptively named and if enacted will directly undermine our nation's landmark conservation laws."
"Wolves play important roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems, and cutting short their recovery not only harms the species but also the incredible landscapes we all love," Richmond added.
Josh Osher, public policy director for Western Watersheds Project, said Tuesday: "We are in a biodiversity crisis, and Congress is playing with fire. These bills would accelerate extinction at a time when we can least afford it."
"The Endangered Species Act isn't just about saving wolves, grizzlies, or sea turtles—it's about protecting the ecosystems that sustain us all," Osher added. "Weakening these protections pushes our planet further into collapse. Congress must open its eyes and reject these reckless attacks before it's too late."
On Monday, dozens of green groups sent a letter to senior lawmakers on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee urging them to reject the two bills, arguing they would "dramatically weaken the ESA and make it harder, if not impossible, to achieve the progress we must make to address the alarming rate of extinction our planet now faces."
The two bills come amid wider Republican attacks on the ESA by members of Congress and the Trump administration, including Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. In a bid to boost logging on public lands, Trump is planning to establish a so-called "God Squad" committee that could veto ESA protections. DOGE, meanwhile, has fired hundreds of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees while ordering a hiring freeze on seasonal workers tasked with species protection.
"The Endangered Species Act is one of the country's most popular and successful conservation laws, and Donald Trump wants to throw it in the garbage to pad the bottom lines of his corporate supporters," Sierra Club deputy legislative director for wildlife and lands protection Bradley Williams said on Monday. "Since day one of his administration, Trump has shown again and again that he wants to hand over control of our public lands and waters to billionaires and corporations. Imperiled wildlife will suffer the consequences."
"For more than 50 years, the United States has made amazing progress bringing species back from the brink of extinction," Williams added. "It's because of the ESA that species like the grizzly bear and bald eagle are living symbols of America and not just photos in a history book. If Trump and his allies in Congress get their way, that progress won't just come to a screeching halt—it could be completely reversed."
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Progressives Condemn GOP Attempts to Blame Biden for Trump Rally Shooting
"This stuff is basically cooked up in a lab to incite further violence," said one critic of comments made by Sen. J.D. Vance, Rep. Mike Collins, and other allies of Trump.
Jul 14, 2024
As federal law enforcement officials launched a full investigation into the shooting at presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's Pennsylvania rally on Saturday, journalists and political observers expressed fear that the act of violence would ramp up political division and turmoil in the United States ahead of the November elections.
Boston Globe reporter James Pindell was among the journalists at the rally who shared that Trump supporters "turned on the media"—a frequent target of Trump during his presidency—after the shooting.
"The crowd was angry," he wrote. "Middle fingers were everywhere. They asked the press if they were happy and blamed the media. 'You did this,' they said to reporters."
Allies of Trump including Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), and former White House adviser Stephen Miller immediately placed blame with President Joe Biden, claiming the attack was the result of warnings that electing the former president to a second term would threaten democracy.
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) denounced Collins' claim that Biden "sent the orders," calling it "a continuation of the bullshit rhetoric that drives political violence."
"A likely assassination attempt and gun violence on Trump is awful on many levels," said Pocan. "Adding jet fuel to the political climate is unbecoming of a member of Congress."
Trump, who spread baseless lies that the 2020 election was rigged against him and urged his supporters to riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 as Congress was certifying the results, has said he would act as a dictator on "day one" of his potential presidency.
Dozens of people who worked in his administration helped to write Project 2025, a far-right political agenda aimed at consolidating power with the president and dismantling parts of the federal government, and he has named political opponents he aims to prosecute and pledged to deploy the military to stop political protests.
"One response to Trump's attempted shooting (apparently by a registered Republican) we must NOT take is to stop framing the existential nature of this election," said political organizer Aaron Regunberg. "The problem isn't Democrats saying Trump is attacking our democracy—the problem is that he's attacking our democracy."
One audience member was killed and two were seriously injured after the gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, fired several shots from a rooftop near Butler Farm Show, where the rally was held.
Trump was escorted off the stage after a bullet "pierced the upper part of his right ear," The New York Timesreported. The Secret Service reported that Crooks had been killed after firing his weapon, and that officials found an AR-15-type semiautomatic rifle near his body.
Authorities did not identify a motive for the shooting.
Crooks was registered as a Republican in his hometown; records also showed that someone named Thomas Crooks donated $15 to a liberal voter turnout campaign called the Progressive Turnout Project in January 2021.
"This remains an active and ongoing investigation," said the FBI in a statement Sunday, as law enforcement agents closed down all roads leading to the home of the suspect's family in Bethel Park in the Pittsburgh area.
David Hogg, who survived the 2018 Parkland, Florida school shooting and co-founded March for Our Lives, said the gunman's ability to fire at the president and kill an audience member while in the presence of Secret Service agents and police is the latest proof that people across the U.S. are vulnerable to gun violence due to a lack of strict gun control laws, which Republican lawmakers have long refused to pass.
"What happened today is unacceptable and what happens every day to kids who aren't the president and don't survive isn't either," said Hogg. "It's insane we have such a major problem with gun violence in America that no one—not even a presidential candidate—is safe."
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House GOP Anti-Wildlife 'Extremists' Approve Boebert's Delisting of Gray Wolves
"The inappropriately named 'Trust the Science Act' not only puts endangered gray wolves at risk for extinction, but it completely undermines the purpose of the Endangered Species Act," one wildlife advocate said.
May 01, 2024
Overriding the opposition of more than 100 environmental groups, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a bill on Tuesday that would strip gray wolves in the Lower 48 states of their protections under the Endangered Species Act.
The so-called Trust the Science Act, which was introduced by far-right election denier Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), passed by a narrow 209-205 margin. It would reimpose a Trump administration decision to delist gray wolves that was later overturned in federal court.
"This move by extremists in Congress to push forward an anti-wolf, anti-science bill is irresponsible and emboldens cruelty towards gray wolves," said Endangered Species Coalition executive director Susan Holmes.
"This is yet another troubling sign that our elected leaders in the House are increasingly choosing to subvert our nation's landmark environmental laws and ignore the biodiversity crisis that threatens wildlife populations around the globe with extinction."
There were once around 2 million gray wolves in North America, but they were nearly hunted to extinction with government support. After the federal government began to protect them in the 1960s, their numbers rebounded to around 6,000, but they only roam through less than 10% of their historic range in the lower 48 states.
Scientists have discovered that wolves are very beneficial for the ecosystems they inhabit; their reintroduction into Yellowstone National Park increased the park's biodiversity by controlling elk and deer that had overgrazed trees, allowing willows and aspens to thrive and attract the song birds and beavers that depend on them.
"The inappropriately named 'Trust the Science Act' not only puts endangered gray wolves at risk for extinction, but it completely undermines the purpose of the Endangered Species Act," Raena Garcia, senior fossil fuels and lands campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "The ESA is essential environmental legislation that needs to be strengthened, not weakened. As a keystone species that plays a vital role in preserving biodiversity, the livelihood of gray wolves can't be dictated by industry-driven politicians."
The Endangered Species Act Coalition and Friends of the Earth Action were two of the more than 100 groups that sent a letter to representatives on Monday urging them to oppose the bill. In the letter, they pointed out that the Trump-era ruling it is based on was overturned because of its faulty science: It based its determination for national wolves on only two populations, it did not define what it meant by a "significant" portion of the species' range, it did not consider what it means for gray wolves to have lost so much of their historic range, and it did not account for the fact that West Coast wolves and northern Rocky Mountain wolves have different ancestries. Despite these flaws with the decision, the bill would also prohibit courts from weighing in a second time.
"The 'Trust the Science Act' undermines the integrity of the ESA by forcing the reinstatement of the Trump administration's scientifically indefensible delisting rule and precluding judicial review, undermining the rule of law that holds government officials accountable in the courts," the conservation groups wrote.
Environmental organizations also argue that the bill would put wolves at even greater risk from human violence. In Wyoming, where wolves are delisted, a man recently injured a young wolf and showed it off at a local bar before killing it. When wolves were delisted during the Trump administration, a hunt reestablished in Wisconsin killed off up to a third of the state's wolves.
"The recent torture and killing of a young gray wolf in Wyoming shows how critical the Endangered Species Act protections are for the survival of this species core to our country's natural heritage," Holmes said.
The bill also comes as the Earth is losing species at such alarming rates that scientists say humans have likely instigated a sixth mass extinction.
"This is yet another troubling sign that our elected leaders in the House are increasingly choosing to subvert our nation's landmark environmental laws and ignore the biodiversity crisis that threatens wildlife populations around the globe with extinction," Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations for Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement. "Wolves play hugely important roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems and cutting short their recovery will only harm our nation."
"The majority of Americans believe that protecting biodiversity should be a national priority and today their voices were stifled," Dewey continued. "We urge the Senate to take the scientifically sound path forward and not take up this bill."
Whatever the Senate decides, it is unlikely the bill would become law while President Joe Biden is in office. The Executive Office of the President's Office of Budget and Management issued a statement on Monday saying the Biden administration "strongly opposes" the bill, arguing that its passage "would undermine America's proud wildlife conservation traditions and the implementation of one of our nation's bedrock environmental laws."
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