Comment Now on the Dismantling of the Endangered Species Act
The Trump administration is illegally rewriting the Endangered Species Act – this is your chance to go on the record opposing it.
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration unleashed four federal rulemakings that effectively mark the end of the Endangered Species Act as a functional safeguard for America’s wildlife. What they’ve done is illegal on its face, and they know it. They simply don’t care, because they learned a devastating lesson from their first term: once a president issues a rule, even an unlawful one, it stays in force unless the courts step in immediately — and today even that doesn’t matter.
The Supreme Court now routinely steps in to overturn or freeze any lower-court decision that threatens a deregulatory agenda, allowing illegal rules to remain in effect for years while the case crawls through the system. In practical terms, it means a president can violate federal law through regulation and keep doing so, because the judicial backstop that once protected the public simply isn’t there anymore.
Those of you who read the piece I wrote about this nightmare know that I’m late getting this follow up out, and that’s not an accident. The administration timed these ESA rollbacks for maximum concealment — the oldest trick in Washington. You drop your most vile, most destructive federal rules right before the holidays, when everyone is exhausted, distracted, buried in travel and family and year-end deadlines. You flood the Federal Register the same way corporations dump bad news late on a Friday. It’s deliberate. It’s strategic. And it’s designed to keep you from noticing while they march an entire continent’s worth of wildlife toward the edge.
It’s Time To Stand Up and Be Counted
A lot of well-meaning NGO’s won’t tell you this because someone in a boardroom somewhere decided it might discourage participation, but the truth is this administration is going to ignore your comment. They’re not reading these. They’re simply running out the clock so they can finalize the rule and make it harder to undo. But, that’s exactly why you need to submit one.
Public comments create the legal record. The legal record becomes the foundation for lawsuits. And lawsuits are the only thing standing between these rules and permanent, irreversible damage. When the courts review this travesty, whether it’s six months from now or six years, they’ll look at the administrative record to see whether the agency ignored science, contradicted the law, or dismissed legitimate concerns. Your comment becomes part of that story. It becomes evidence. It becomes something an attorney can hold up in front of a judge and say: “The public warned them. The science warned them. They disregarded all of it.”
And beyond the legal mechanics, there’s something deeper at stake here — something personal and generational. This is your chance to be on the record. To not go quietly into that good night. To show your grandchildren, and their children after them, that you saw what was happening to this country and to its wildlife, and you refused to look away. That when the most powerful people in America tried to rewrite a law passed in 1973 to stop exactly this kind of destruction, you stood up and said: not in my name.
These comments are forever part of the public record. Long after we’re gone, some AI historian will be able to pull up your words for your great-great-grandchildren when they’re visiting the Tree Museum and at least they’ll be able to turn to their friends and say, my ancestors knew better.
Below are sample comments designed to carry weight in court for each of the four rulemakings. Their titles have been linked the corresponding pages in the federal register where you can make your comment. You can copy these word-for-word or just use them as a starting point. What matters is that you show up, add your voice, and make them feel the weight of opposition — even if they pretend not to hear it.
Sample Public Comments
I’m writing to express my strong opposition to the proposed revisions to the regulations governing species listing and critical habitat designation under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The proposed revisions flagrantly exceed the agency’s authority in a way that is entirely impermissible. Congress could not have been clearer when it directed the Secretary to make listing determinations “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” (16 U.S.C. § 1533(b)(1)(A)). The statute does not leave room for policy preferences, economic balancing, or administrative discretion on this question. It is a mandatory, unqualified instruction. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that when Congress speaks with this level of clarity, agencies are bound by that command. They do not have license to revisit or dilute it.
The proposed rule attempts to do exactly that. By introducing economic considerations into the listing process, considerations Congress expressly excluded, the agency is asserting a power it does not possess. This is not a matter of interpretation or gap-filling; it is a direct contradiction of the statutory text. An agency may not override Congress because it prefers a different policy outcome, nor may it recast a prohibited factor as a permissible one through regulatory language. Doing so would effectively amend the statute by regulation, something no agency has the authority to do.
Additionally, the proposed narrowing of critical habitat designations is inconsistent with both the statutory text and longstanding judicial interpretation. Critical habitat must include both occupied and unoccupied areas essential for conservation and recovery. By imposing new constraints on unoccupied habitat, including requirements that effectively preclude designating future climate-suitable habitat, the rule undermines the recovery mandate at the heart of the ESA. The Supreme Court has affirmed that “conservation” means recovery, not mere survival. Any rule that prevents the Service from designating habitat needed for recovery is contrary to law.
The ESA is a statute whose commands are specific. The agency does not have discretion to disregard them. These proposed revisions are in defiance of the law and should be rescinded.
I oppose the proposed revisions to the ESA’s section 4(b)(2) exclusion framework. While the ESA permits the Secretary to exclude areas from critical habitat when the benefits of exclusion outweigh the benefits of designation, Congress intended this authority to be narrow and used only when exclusion would not result in extinction. The proposed rule improperly elevates economic considerations above biological needs, requiring the agency to give de facto prioritization to economic impacts even when these impacts are speculative or secondary.
The rule also creates an impermissibly high evidentiary threshold for retaining habitat, by stating that areas should be excluded unless the agency can demonstrate that exclusion would lead to extinction. This reverses the ESA’s precautionary orientation and is inconsistent with the statute’s protective purpose. Courts have consistently held that critical habitat must be designated with recovery in mind, not merely avoidance of extinction.
Moreover, the rule appears to give disproportionate weight to non-biological actors, including private industry, by encouraging the submission of economic “concerns” without requiring equivalent scientific rigor. This threatens to transform the exclusion process into a mechanism for regulated entities to override scientific judgment — a result Congress explicitly sought to prevent when it stripped economic considerations from the listing process.
I urge the Service to abandon these revisions and maintain a 4(b)(2) framework that ensures exclusions remain rare, justified, and fully subordinate to the biological needs of listed species.
I strongly oppose the proposed rule rescinding the long-standing blanket 4(d) protections for threatened species. For decades, the blanket rule has provided essential safeguards by automatically extending most section 9 prohibitions to threatened species upon listing, unless species-specific rules were developed. Removing this protection will result in long delays before threatened species receive necessary conservation measures, directly contradicting the ESA’s precautionary design.
Congress created distinct “endangered” and “threatened” categories to allow for earlier intervention, not to defer protections until decline becomes severe. The blanket rule is an efficient, scientifically defensible mechanism that prevents threats from escalating while species-specific management plans are crafted. Without it, newly threatened species will be left unprotected during their most vulnerable period, increasing the likelihood that they progress toward endangered status or extinction.
The proposed rule also provides no evidence that the blanket rule creates regulatory burdens inconsistent with the ESA or the APA. On the contrary, eliminating the rule will increase administrative workload by necessitating dozens of species-specific 4(d) rules, delaying urgently needed protections.
For these reasons, I urge the Service to retain the blanket 4(d) rule that ensures timely and scientifically grounded protections for all threatened species.
I oppose the proposed revisions to the interagency consultation regulations under ESA section 7. Effective consultation is essential to ensuring that federal actions do not jeopardize listed species or destroy critical habitat. The proposed changes would significantly weaken this process.
By narrowing key definitions — including the “environmental baseline” and the standard for effects “reasonably certain to occur” — the rule risks allowing agencies to overlook cumulative, indirect, and climate-driven impacts that are well-documented in ecological literature. For many species, particularly those experiencing habitat fragmentation or climate stress, these indirect effects are among the primary drivers of decline. Excluding them from consideration is inconsistent with both the ESA’s purpose and the “best available science” standard.
The removal of offsetting measures, which have long been an important tool for reducing harm when incidental take cannot be avoided, further undermines conservation outcomes. Offsetting requirements are not substitutes for avoidance, but they are essential for ensuring that unavoidable impacts do not cumulatively weaken populations over time.
The ESA requires a “conservation” mandate that promotes recovery, not simply survival. These revisions move consultation away from that statutory requirement. I urge the Services to withdraw the proposal and instead strengthen, not weaken, protections for federally listed species.
I Know You’re Probably Exhausted
I know you’re sick, and I’m sick too. I’m sick of the firehose of illegal and immoral executive actions. I’m sick of the contempt this administration has for our American ideals and for anyone outside its wealthy orbit. I’m sick of what this is doing to our country, to our institutions, to our wildlife, to our standing in the world, and to the very idea of a nation governed by laws instead of power.
But sickness is exactly what they want. They want exhaustion. They want resignation. They want you to believe that democracy is just an old Greek word, that Congress is irrelevant, that public comment is a box-checking exercise, that the courts are foregone conclusions, that nothing you do matters. They want you to look at the chaos and conclude that the strong decide and the rest of us simply endure.
Which is is why we have to carry on the fight.
Socrates taught that our first duty is to live examined lives, to question what is happening around us and refuse to accept injustice simply because it comes dressed as authority. MLK reminded us that justice isn’t automatic, that progress only comes when ordinary people choose to stand up and insist on it. Gandhi told us we have to be the change we wish to see in the world, a line my dad quoted so often in my childhood I still hear it in my sleep. And he was right. Because the truth is brutally simple: no one is coming to save us. It’s up to us.
And rising to that responsibility requires seeing the moment for what it is. Not shrinking from it, not sugarcoating it, but choosing to act anyway. By staying in the fight. By adding our names to the record. By refusing to go silent when silence is exactly what they’re counting on. By understanding that democracy doesn’t survive on its own, it survives because people pick it up and carry it even when the weight becomes too much for the institutions built to hold it.
We have some tough months ahead, but if we stay engaged and prepared to do defend what’s ours, we’ll get through this.
Until next time,
Jim
This is exactly why I wrote about Wallace Stegner’s Wilderness Letter yesterday!
Now one of the most famous conservation texts in U.S. history, that letter was actually nothing more than Stegner’s own comment letter, in which he advocated for permanent wilderness protections of public lands.
It’s an amazing example of what you said here. He left a “comment,” although a rather elaborate 2,500-word one, on December 3, 1960, and it’s still read, quoted, used, and relevant 65 years later.
Thanks for your leadership on this! Article has been restacked and I've submitted my comments.