House Republicans are Trying to Gut the Endangered Species Act
Bruce Westerman's HR 1897 was minutes from a House floor vote when Republican support cracked. He'll be back soon.
On Wednesday, April 22, Earth Day, House Republicans came within minutes of passing the most aggressive rewrite of the Endangered Species Act in its fifty-three-year history.
They didn’t fail on principle. They failed on math.
A procedural vote earlier that afternoon showed the rule wouldn't hold. About half a dozen Republicans were wavering — Florida representatives plus Andrew Garbarino on Long Island and Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania. Speaker Mike Johnson, who personally scheduled the bill for Earth Day as a kind of ceremonial middle finger to the country, yanked it from the floor without explanation.
By that evening he was forced to admit he’d been blindsided by his own caucus. “You can go to any of the Floridians,” Johnson told reporters, “and they’ll tell you they have a lot of issues down there with some of the endangered species, and they just had concerns that we weren’t aware of in advance.”
Translation: Speaker Johnson tried to ram through the destruction of America’s bedrock wildlife law on Earth Day and didn’t even bother to count the votes first.
That’s how arrogant they’ve become. That’s how unaccustomed they are to losing.
And they came within a hair of winning anyway.
What HR 1897 Actually Does
Bruce Westerman, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, introduced HR 1897 — the so-called “ESA Amendments Act of 2025” — as a modernization of a tired old law. He told the country the Endangered Species Act “has consistently failed to achieve its intended goals” and “morphed into a weapon instead of a tool.”
This is a man speaking about a law that has prevented extinction for ninety-nine percent of the species placed under its protection. The bald eagle, the American alligator, the humpback whale, the brown pelican, the peregrine falcon, the gray wolf, the manatee. All of them still exist because of the law Westerman is trying to gut.
The bill is roughly forty pages of carefully laundered industry wishlist items, but the structural damage falls along a few clear lines.
It Rewrites How Species Get Listed
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of the most beautifully simple statutes Congress has ever passed. It says listing decisions must be based “solely on the best scientific and commercial data available.” Not economics. Not politics. Not whether some oil company is annoyed. Just: is the species at risk?
Westerman’s bill blows that up. Every listing decision must now include a mandatory economic and national security analysis — the same poison Doug Burgum tried to inject through regulation last fall, only this time written into permanent statute. The Secretary of the Interior gets to extend the 90-day decision deadline to the last day of the fiscal year. The agencies get to slow-roll listings indefinitely while species die in the meantime. And the bill creates a new “presumption” that data submitted by a state, tribe, or local government counts as the best available science — regardless of whether it actually is.
That last provision is its own quiet horror. It means a state agency captured by the cattle lobby or the timber industry can submit junk and the federal government has to treat it as gospel.
It Guts Critical Habitat
Critical habitat is the spine of species recovery. You can’t save an animal without protecting the place it lives. Westerman’s bill narrows the very definition of habitat to areas “currently capable” of supporting a species, eliminating the ability to protect degraded land that needs to be restored or land a species needs as climate, fire, drought, and development push it out of where it used to live.
It also requires an economic impact analysis every time a critical habitat designation is even considered, and it expands industry’s ability to demand exclusions. Read together, those two provisions don’t tighten critical habitat. They functionally end it.
It Loosens “Take”
Under current law, “take” — meaning to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect — is the prohibition that gives the ESA its teeth. You don’t need to drive a species extinct to violate the law. You just need to harm a member of it.
HR 1897 increases the allowable take of threatened species, fast-tracks incidental take permits with reduced agency review, and narrows the “jeopardy” standard that’s governed federal consultations for more than fifty years. Effects “remote in time,” effects that are “geographically remote,” effects reached “through a lengthy causal chain” — all carved out of the analysis. In plain English, that’s a huge part of the cumulative damage that drives species toward extinction. Climate change, downstream pollution, slow-motion habitat fragmentation, the steady chemistry of a watershed being poisoned. Westerman’s bill orders the agencies not to look at any of it.
It Supercharges the God Squad.
Section 506 is the provision that cracked the Florida delegation, and it’s the most strategically dangerous piece of the entire bill.
The Endangered Species Committee, referred to as the “God Squad,” is the seven-member Cabinet-level panel created in 1978 with the power to vote a federal action through the ESA even if it will drive a species to extinction. Five of seven members must vote yes. By design, getting to a vote is brutally hard. A formal jeopardy finding from the Fish and Wildlife Service, an exhausted search for a reasonable and prudent alternative, a timely exemption application, an evidentiary hearing in front of an administrative law judge — the works. In nearly fifty years, the committee has met four times. The first three are footnotes. The fourth was just a month ago on March 31, 2026, when the Trump administration convened it to exempt the entire Gulf of Mexico oil and gas program from the Endangered Species Act. Not a single project. The whole program. They did it over the heads of roughly fifty-one Rice’s whales — the only large whale endemic to U.S. waters, a species federal scientists have already concluded will likely go extinct if Gulf drilling continues. The committee voted unanimously to drill anyway.
Section 506 of this bill does four things to the ESA. It swaps the statute's objective standard, did the Fish & Wildlife Service identify a reasonable and prudent alternative or didn't it, for a subjective one: an applicant can now demand a God Squad vote anyway, so long as the alternative “may impair national security” or cause “significant adverse national or regional economic impacts.” Any halfway-competent industry lawyer can manufacture a yes. Pete Hegseth already showed the playbook on March 31 by citing the Strait of Hormuz to justify the Gulf vote. It makes exemptions permanent — once granted, the species loses protection from that activity indefinitely, regardless of how conditions change. It strips the mitigation requirements that normally attach to an exemption, so a species can end up worse off after a God Squad vote than if no alternative had ever been proposed. And it opens applications beyond federal agencies — states and private corporations can now file directly. A Wyoming mining company, a Texas oil major, the state of Utah, walking up to the committee with a checkbook and an exemption form.
The committee that has met four times in fifty years would now meet routinely. Every fight conservationists have won at the Service level over the last half century would be relitigated, in a venue stacked against wildlife. Section 506 is the construction of an industry exit ramp around the entire Endangered Species Act — and it’s exactly the legal cover the Trump administration needs to make sure their March 31 Gulf exemption survives. Defenders of Wildlife is in court right now arguing that the exemption is illegal because Interior never followed the procedural requirements before voting. There’s a strong chance they win. Section 506 of this bill would retroactively legitimize the strategy that the courts are otherwise likely to overturn.
It Strips Out the Courts
Section 303 removes American citizens ability to challenge federal delisting decisions in court for at least five years after a delisting. If the Fish and Wildlife Service decides tomorrow that the grizzly bear is recovered — even if the science is fraudulent, even if the agency is captured, even if the delisting is wrong — citizens have no recourse for half a decade. By then, of course, the bears are gone.
Meanwhile, Section 506 rolls out the red carpet for industry. A foreign mining conglomerate, an oil major, a real estate developer who finds a panther inconvenient — they all get to march straight into a Cabinet meeting and demand an exemption from the Endangered Species Act.
Your rights, gone. Industry’s rights, expanded. That’s the entire bill in one sentence. It’s a corporate hostile takeover of a law written for Americans.
Why This Is Worse Than the Regulations
I’ve been writing for months about the Trump administration’s regulatory assault on the Endangered Species Act. Burgum’s four federal rulemakings last fall. The redefinition of “harm.” The gutting of critical habitat. The hostile takeover of Section 7 consultations. All of it vile. All of it lawless.
But all of those attacks share one feature that HR 1897 doesn’t: they can be undone.
A future president can rewrite these rulemakings. A future agency can withdraw them. A federal court can enjoin them. The Loper Bright SCOTUS decision that destroyed Chevron deference cuts both ways — agencies can no longer hide behind their own interpretations, but neither can a future Republican administration lock in its rollback by interpretive sleight of hand. Whatever this administration breaks at the agency level, the next administration can begin to rebuild.
Statute is different. A law passed by Congress and signed by a president is the most durable form of policy this country has. It’s not subject to Loper Bright. It’s not vulnerable to a future president’s pen. It can’t be enjoined by a federal judge for being arbitrary or capricious because Congress, by definition, gets to be both. To undo a statute, you need to pass another statute. Which means sixty votes in the Senate. Which means, in practice, decades.
That’s what makes HR 1897 different and so dangerous. It’s the operation that converts Trump’s regulatory rollback into a permanent feature of American law. The economic test for listings, the gutted habitat definition, the vastly expanded God Squad, the stripped-out judicial review — all of it written into the United States Code, and all of it incredibly hard to reverse.
Why Florida Cracked
Here’s the part the national press mostly glossed over. The Florida Republicans who blocked HR 1897 didn’t do it out of any newfound love for the Endangered Species Act. They did it because they saw the through-line between the bill and the Trump administration’s offshore drilling agenda — and they saw the political price they’d pay back home if Florida tourism started watching oil rigs rise off Pensacola, Naples, and the Keys.
This has been an underlying point of friction in Trump’s MAGA coalition since his first term. Trump is obsessed with drilling anywhere and everywhere possible. Republicans in Florida love Trump and they love drilling everywhere — except off the Florida coast. It’s a line they simply can’t cross because their constituents, including the ones who write big checks, simply won’t have it. Florida’s beaches are the powerhouse of the state’s economy and oil rigs off the coast would ruin it.
Kat Cammack, the Republican from Florida’s third district who emerged as the most public face of the holdouts, told E&E News she was specifically concerned about the God Squad expansion. “What we’re concerned about is opening up any potential avenues for drilling in the Gulf,” she said. “We have very sensitive ecosystems that we want to protect and ecotourism is a huge part of our state’s economy.”
Anna Paulina Luna, the MAGA Republican from St. Petersburg, posted a Gadsden flag with a sea turtle on it. “Don’t tread on my turtles,” she wrote. “Protected means protected.”
Maria Elvira Salazar of Miami also raised objections, as did Andrew Garbarino, a New York Republican whose Long Island district depends on the same kinds of coastal ecosystems — piping plovers nesting on Fire Island and Long Island’s South Shore beaches, North Atlantic right whales offshore — that the ESA exists to defend.
Brian Fitzpatrick, the Pennsylvania Republican who often defects on environmental votes, simply told his colleagues there was “no sound justification for weakening a law with such a proven record of success and broad public support.”
The Florida revolt is the closest thing this Congress has produced to a coalition that can actually stop legislation. It’s not principled — most of these members will turn around and vote for the next public lands sell-off without flinching. But on this specific bill, in this specific moment, the political calculus broke against Westerman. The Florida Everglades alone host dozens of endangered species and contribute more than thirty billion dollars a year to the state’s economy. The math doesn’t work for them.
Which is why Westerman is right now back in his office trying to fix that math.
The Window
After Speaker Johnson pulled the bill, Westerman was asked when it would return. His answer was direct: “We just have a few provisions we’ve got to work through on it, and hopefully in the next couple of weeks, we’ll be able to vote on it.”
A couple of weeks. That’s the window.
Westerman isn’t abandoning HR 1897. He’s editing it. He’s sitting down with the Florida holdouts, peeling off the parts they can’t politically swallow, sanding the edges of Section 506, possibly carving out a Florida coastal exemption, and lining up the floor count again. He has the full backing of the White House. He has the full backing of Speaker Johnson, who personally invested political capital in trying to pass this on Earth Day. He has the full backing of every extraction industry trade association in Washington, who have been writing this bill in some form for thirty years.
And he has reason to believe he’ll get there. Because the Florida cracks were narrow. Cammack already said “we fully agree that there needs to be updates to the Endangered Species Act” — a tell that her objection is to specific provisions, not the project. Luna’s turtles tweet is a social media ploy, not a vote. The minute Westerman hands them a slightly less inflammatory bill, most of these members are likely to vote yes.
Unless their phones don’t stop ringing.
What About the Senate?
The bill would still need 60 votes in the Senate. Republicans only have 53, which means seven Democrats have to cross the aisle. So we’re saved, right?
Don’t bet on it. The structure of the bill is so extreme that it’s probably not going to pass the Senate as a standalone vote. The Trump administration just used the God Squad to exempt the entire Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act, and that should have permanently ended the “good faith reform” argument.
But that defense gets weaker the moment you understand how Westerman intends to pass this thing.
In an E&E News interview last year, Westerman openly said his ESA changes could pass through “a permitting package, if it had enough momentum.” That’s the Trojan horse. Permitting reform is a long-running bipartisan priority. Corporate media has been begging Congress to gut NEPA since before Trump returned to the White House. They’ve been laundering polluting industry talking points for years now.
There was a permitting deal in the last Congress that didn’t get done. There will be another one. And when there is, the worst provisions of HR 1897 — the gutted critical habitat, the expanded God Squad, the stripped citizen suits — could be quietly attached to it as the price of doing the deal.
If that happens, this passes. Not on its merits. Not after a public Senate debate. As a rider on something else, framed as a clean-energy compromise, sold to the public as a way to get solar projects built faster.
And Senate Democrats have already cracked the door on negotiating with Westerman directly on this bill. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told E&E News when the bill was first introduced: “I’m not going to throw my arms open, but if anyone can get me to the table, it’s Westerman.” Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on that same committee, was more skeptical, but still open: “I would not shut the door on finding ways to improve the ESA, but I have not seen products from the House in the past that have done that in good faith.” Heinrich is right to be skeptical, but Westerman doesn’t need a yes from him today. He just needs the door to stay cracked until the vehicle arrives.
This is the same pattern we’ve seen on every public lands fight in this Congress. Democrats wait. Democrats hedge. Democrats trade away leverage in exchange for press releases. Then when the thing they could’ve prevented happens they perform outrage with social media posts and more press releases.
So if you live in Colorado, New Mexico, or any other state with a Democratic senator who hasn’t publicly committed to opposing HR 1897 and any package containing its provisions, you have a phone call to make. Don’t accept “I’m watching this closely.” Don’t accept “I have concerns.” Get them on record opposing this bill and any permitting deal that contains any piece of it. Make them tell you no, in public, before the vehicle exists.
Because once the vehicle exists, it’s probably already too late.
What You Can Do Right Now
There are two phone calls to make. The first is to kill HR 1897 in the House before Westerman gets it back to the floor. The second is to make sure that if it does pass the House, it can’t ride a permitting deal into law.
Step One: Kill It in the House
About half a dozen Republicans signaled defection on Earth Day. Five have been publicly named. Westerman is right now in his office trying to peel them off one at a time. Every constituent call to their offices is a vote against him handing them a quiet revision they can swallow. Don’t bother with their contact forms. Forms get sorted into deletion piles. Call the Washington office. Talk to a staffer. Take thirty seconds.
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL-03) — 202-225-5744. Say: "Congresswoman Cammack has said she wants 'improvements' to HR 1897. That isn't enough. I want her to commit publicly to voting no on any version of this bill — including the revised one Westerman is writing right now to win her vote. The Endangered Species Act isn’t something to be toyed with. The law works. Keep Florida’s animals protected."
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL-13) — 202-225-5961. Say: "Congresswoman Luna posted 'Don't tread on my turtles. Protected means protected.' I'm calling to ask her to put that into a vote. A no on this version of HR 1897 isn't enough — she needs to commit to no on every version, including whatever Westerman comes back with in two weeks."
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL-27) — 202-225-3931. Say: "Congresswoman Salazar raised concerns about HR 1897 privately. I want her to make that opposition public and to commit to voting no on any version of this bill. Florida’s manatees, sawfish, and reefs will pay the price if this bill is passed."
Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY-02) — 202-225-7896. Say: "Congressman Garbarino raised concerns about HR 1897 privately. I want him to make that opposition public and commit to voting no on any version of this bill. New Yorkers care about wildlife and don’t want the Endangered Species Act being messed with."
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA-01) — 202-225-4276. Say: "I want to thank Congressman Fitzpatrick for publicly opposing HR 1897. And I want to ask that he continue to oppose any future version of this bill that is a corporate takeover of the Endangered Species Act."
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL-16) — 202-225-5015. Say: “I’m calling to ask Congressman Buchanan to publicly oppose HR 1897. Congressman Buchanan’s advocacy for the Endangered Species Act means a great deal to me and I hope that he will continue to champion the ESA and oppose any form of HR 1897, which amounts to a coporate takeover of the ESA and would have disastrous results.”
If you live in any of these districts, say so. Constituent calls weigh more than calls from elsewhere, but every call counts. The Capitol switchboard, if any direct line fails, is 202-224-3121. And whoever your own representative is, Republican or Democrat, call them too. Tell them you want a no vote on HR 1897 in any form, and you’ll remember if they don't deliver one.
Step Two: Lock Down Your Senators
The bill is unlikely to clear the Senate as a standalone vote, but that’s not how Westerman intends to pass it. He’s said the ESA changes could ride a permitting package “if it had enough momentum.” That’s the major threat — the worst pieces of HR 1897 quietly attached to a bipartisan permitting deal sometime in the next year, and sold to the public as a clean-energy compromise.
Whoever your senators are, call them. Both of them. Republican or Democrat. The ask is the same: a public, on-the-record commitment to oppose HR 1897 and any package that contains any provision of it. Don’t accept “I’m watching this closely.” Don’t accept “I have concerns.” Don’t accept anything short of a public commitment, before the vehicle exists.
The Endangered Species Act is not a chip to cash in for permitting reform. It’s not a bargaining tool. It’s the law that has prevented the deliberate extinction of American wildlife for fifty-three years, and you don’t want any part of it traded away for solar permitting or anything else.
Sample Script for a Republican Senator
Hi, my name is [Name].
I'm asking Senator [Name] to oppose HR 1897, the ESA Amendments Act, when it reaches the Senate — and to oppose any permitting package, energy bill, or other legislation that contains any piece of it.
The Endangered Species Act has saved 99 percent of the species ever placed under its protection. That’s an easily verifiable fact that proponents of this bill keep trying to sidestep. The bald eagle. The American alligator. The brown pelican. The peregrine falcon. The humpback whale. All of them are still here because of this law. It’s one of the most successful conservation laws in the history of the world, and it has tremendous bipartisan support.
I’m urging the Senator to oppose this bill in any form it takes. It amounts to a corporate takeover of a law that Americans love and support. Thank you for your time.
Sample Script for a Democratic Senator
“Hi, my name is [Name].
I’m calling to ask Senator [Name] to publicly oppose HR 1897, the ESA Amendments Act, and any bill that contains any piece of it.
In 1973, this country made a promise. We said that no matter how inconvenient, no matter how much money was on the other side of the scale, we would not be the generation that let our wildlife disappear. We passed that promise into law with almost no one voting against it. And for fifty-three years, it’s held. The bald eagle is still here. The alligator is still here. The humpback whale is still here. Ninety-nine percent of the species we ever protected under this law are still on Earth because of it. It’s a promise we should be incredibly proud of and wholly uninterested in changing.
HR 1897 is not a ‘reform.’ It’s an attempt to break that promise. It’s been written by the same industries that have wanted it broken for fifty years, and there is no version of it that can be negotiated in good faith.
I am asking the Senator to defend the promise of the Endangered Species Act — out loud, on the record, before any permitting deal is on the table. Thank you.”
Stay Loud
HR 1897 isn’t dead. It was paused. The same speaker who tried to pass it on Earth Day is right now coordinating with the same chairman who wrote it to bring it back. The same White House that’s been demanding ESA “reform” for a year is right now telling Republican holdouts they need to find a way to yes. The same extraction lobbies that have been writing this bill in various forms for three decades are right now drafting the language that will be quietly inserted into Section 506 to peel off Cammack and Salazar and Garbarino. And waiting in the Senate is a permitting deal that does not yet exist but will, eventually, and when it arrives, the worst pieces of this bill will be sitting inside it.
This isn’t a fight that ends because we got one good headline on a Wednesday afternoon. It ends when the bill is dead and every senator who might trade it away has been forced to say so in public.
They want us to celebrate an Earth Day victory, post a sea turtle, and move on. They’re counting on the same exhaustion that’s carried every other public lands attack across the finish line in this Congress.
The Endangered Species Act is the law that has stood between us and the deliberate extinction of American wildlife for fifty-three years. It saved the bald eagle. It saved the alligator. It saved the gray wolf, the manatee, the brown pelican, the peregrine falcon, the whooping crane. It is among the proudest pieces of legislation this country has ever produced — and it works. Eighty-four percent of Americans support it. Ninety-nine percent of the species placed under it have been kept from extinction.
They want to gut it because they they don’t care to serve the interests of the American public and they think people are too distracted and exhausted to care.
Make them pay attention.
Stay loud. Stay angry. Stay relentless. Don’t give them the silence they need.
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Thanks for reading. Until next time,
-Jim
We can't afford for this to happen. Why don't these politicians understand that when endangered species disappear, the planet is affected in ways we won't see until it's too late to fix it. We have to protect what IS and HAS been in order to survive.
Hatred of animals doesn’t say a lot for that group. Thats why they’re so hateful to others now