Trump Administration Decides Endangered Species Act Will No Longer Be Followed
If it sounds illegal, that's because it is.
This week, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, a ventriloquist dummy for the oil industry, dropped four nuclear bombs on the Endangered Species Act that amount to it’s end in any functional manner.
Oh, and the bare minimum 30-day public comment period? That starts today and runs over Thanksgiving and the holiday season. A coldly calculated choice because they know what they’re doing is outrageous. They know it’s illegal. They just don’t care. They want it done fast, buried under football and gravy and holiday noise.
In fact, this announcement was made on Wednesday and I’m guessing this may be the first you’re hearing of it despite having a news feed that’s supposed to be dialed in to calamitous environmental news such as this. That’s because the media is too busy covering other scandals like they’re just another news item and not the continued and unprecedented disgrace of our government and standing in the world.
Anyway, let me walk you through how these depraved ghouls are ending the Endangered Species Act.
The Death of a Landmark Law by Illegal Decree
You might recall I mentioned four nuclear bombs dropped on the ESA by that oil-soaked sock puppet. That’s four federal rulemakings all dumped into the federal register today. Within those are five distinct assaults on the ESA. They’re as follows:
I know you won’t be surprised when I tell you that is explicitly illegal. The Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, says decisions must be based “solely on the best scientific and commercial data available.” No economic impacts. No political horse-trading. Just: is the species at risk? That’s it.
But here we are 52 years later, these clowns are openly violating the law and calling it “reform.” Our government in 1973 had more spine, more foresight, and more moral clarity than we do now. And let’s pause for context here. 1973 was the midst of the Watergate scandal that shattered trust and still, politicians from both parties and President Nixon had the sense and the decency to pass the Endangered Species Act. What does that say about where are now? Of course this administration makes Watergate look like Obama’s tan suit.
The new rule destroys the government’s ability to designate critical habitat. If an endangered species doesn’t currently occupy an area, even if it historically lived there, even if it must return there for its recovery — too bad. No protection. If a species is losing habitat to development, logging, mining, wildfires, drought, sea-level rise, pollution — too bad. And yes, if it’s threatened by climate change? Still no. The new standard basically says unless the threat is something tidy and convenient to industry, habitat doesn’t count.
Since 1978, the ESA has automatically given threatened species the same protections as endangered species unless tailored rules are in place. This blanket protection was how we stopped species from sliding off the cliff into extinction while the Fish & Wildlife Service figured out the specific protections the species needed.
Now? They’re deleting that rule. Which means species listed as threatened going forward will receive zero protections. Log it. Bulldoze it. Poison its habitat. There’s no safety net.
Imagine your house is on fire and the fire department shows up, looks at the flames, and says,“We’re not going to do anything about it until we draft a custom fire-response plan… someday.” It’s literally the opposite of what the ESA is all about. And companies whose activities are driving an animal to extinction will now be encouraged to finish the job when a species is listed as threatened. Better finish it off before they come up with a plan someday.
Even after habitat is designated as critical (on the off chance any habitat qualifies under these new rules) this rule forces the agency to weigh industry’s “economic concerns” against science and invites corporations to demand exclusions. And under the new framework, those exclusions go through unless the agency can prove that removing the habitat would directly cause the species’ extinction — an impossibly high bar that all but guarantees industry gets its way. In practice, it means corporations can pressure the government to erase habitat protections that federal biologists already determined were essential for a species’ survival and recovery. There may never be a more literal example of the old phrase the fox guarding the henhouse.
Section 7 wildlife consultations are one of the ESA’s core safeguards that for nearly half a century has forced federal agencies to stop and assess whether their actions will harm an endangered species. This safeguard has been the backbone of the ESA, the scientific gate that stopped dams, highways, pipelines, logging operations, and mining projects from quietly shoving species toward extinction.
Under the new rule, that brake pedal is being sawed off. They narrow key definitions so agencies can ignore ongoing harms, dismiss indirect or cumulative impacts, and pretend slow-moving threats don’t count. They raise the evidentiary bar so high that unless damage is immediate and undeniable, it’s treated as speculative. And they strip out the requirement to offset harm when federal projects kill wildlife, meaning agencies can destroy habitat and take endangered animals with zero obligation to fix what they broke.
Remember 2019?
Some of you may be having déjà vu reading this. You’re probably remembering when Trump tried much of this in 2019. That evisceration of the ESA from Trump’s first term went into effect and stayed in effect for the remainder of his presidency. Environmental groups sued, they filed in friendly courts, they even won a massive ruling in 2022 when Judge Jon Tigar vacated the rules four years after they were instituted. But do you know what came next? The Ninth Circuit stayed that victory just a few months later, meaning the Trump extinction rules snapped right back into place and remained the law of the land until the Biden administration painstakingly repealed and replaced them. That took years. All four years of Biden’s presidency were required just to unwind the damage Trump did in his illegal 2019 ESA rulemaking. Think about that. The rules were blatantly illegal, destined to be overturned in court some day, and yet they remained in effect for six long years. Think about the damage that did in terms of lives lost and habitat destroyed that you never read about.
The lesson here is obvious and one the Trump administration learned all too well: once these extinction rules go into effect, they’re almost impossible to pry loose. Even when they’re blatantly illegal. Even when a district court strikes them down. Even when an administration promises to undo them. The machinery of administrative law moves like a glacier, and the Supreme Court now stands ready to intervene on the side of deregulation at the first sign of resistance. In 2019, the legal system was slow. In 2025, it’s hostile.
The More Sinister Truth This Lays Bare
As you might have started to gather, this is far more terrifying than a single attack on the Endangered Species Act. It exposes the hard truth about the country we’re living in now: the president can violate federal law, openly and repeatedly, and there is almost nothing Congress or the courts can do to stop him in time. That’s the revelation baked into these ESA rollbacks. A law Congress passed in 1973 to prevent exactly this, to stop the government from trading away vulnerable wildlife for profit, can now be gutted in broad daylight simply by rushing a rule through, picking a few friendly courts, and waiting for the Supreme Court to tacitly bless it.
Congress wrote the ESA assuming courts would enforce it, that injunctions would stop illegal rules from taking effect, that agencies would follow science and the law, that presidents couldn’t simply rewrite a statute by regulation. But those guardrails are gone. The modern Supreme Court has dismantled the tools that once kept presidents within the bounds of the law — nationwide injunctions, deference to scientific expertise, a neutral shadow docket, a judiciary that understood its job. In their place they’ve built a system where delay is victory. Where a president can break the law on Monday, get sued on Tuesday, and keep breaking the law for years because the courts refuse to intervene quickly or at all. Once an illegal rule takes effect, it becomes the operational reality until a future administration chooses to undo it — something that can take an entire presidential term.
This is the constitutional crisis no one’s talking about. We no longer live in a system where Congress writes laws and the president carries them out. We live in a system where the president governs by regulation, by creating his own laws and publishing them in the federal register, regardless of whether they violate the actual laws passed by Congress. And as long as he can count on a handful of ideologically aligned judges, or five votes on the Supreme Court, he can ignore statutes whenever they inconvenience his agenda. That’s the startling truth this moment lays bare. And it begs the question, where does this lead?
Hard To Believe
The Endangered Species Act was passed by Congress in 1973 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Richard Nixon signed it. And it said, in plain language, that extinction is not acceptable. That we have a duty to act. That some things are too sacred, too rare, too irreplaceable to lose.
And now these scoundrels are acting like that was the radical position.
We’re living in a moment where America’s laws were more compassionate, more courageous, and more protective half a century ago than they are today. And that should shatter us. That should shake us awake.
So what do we do?
The Fight
I know the outlook I’ve just presented you with for the ESA is incredibly bleak, but the fight has to go on. Environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity will be suing and slugging this out in the courts, probably for years, we should support them.
One of the most important things we can do is make our public comments. We know the administration will ignore them, but that’s not why we make them. They’re part of the public record, a valuable asset for environmental groups and their attorneys to cite as evidence of the public opposition and the harm these rules will produce.
There are four separate rulemakings they’ve published in the federal register today on this. Yes, it’s a blitz. I’ve linked them below (I also linked them in the section where I explained them). Next week, we’ll include sample comments for those of you busy with work/family/the holidays, so please stay tuned.
As usual, I wish I had better news. Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Jim
Hi! I'll make a video that includes all four of the federal register comment items and will tag you all, will stay tuned for your suggested comments and direct people to your language and source you in the video. Keep me posted! I'm devastated, but we slug it out.
Thanks for your vigilance on these issues