President Donald Trump’s administration removed a rule that automatically extended Endangered Species Act protections to plants and animals judged to be threatened, a move critics said could push species toward extinction.
Instead of receiving automatic protections, species listed as threatened will require individualized protection plans once added to the threatened list, a process that officials said will replace blanket protections.
Environmental and wildlife opponents warned the change could make it harder to save species and cited monarch butterflies and alligator snapping turtles as examples at risk under the new policy.
Officials said there have been no species added to the endangered or threatened lists in Trump’s second term; by comparison, more than 20 species were added in Trump’s first term and about 60 were added during the Biden presidency.
About 30 species are currently proposed to be listed as threatened, including monarchs, alligator snapping turtles, California spotted owls and various snakes, fish, clams and insects.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement that the Endangered Species Act had been used for too long "to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security," and added that "Success should be measured by species recovery and delisting, not by adding more species to the list." He also noted that 97% of species that have been given protections still have them.
A second change finalized Friday requires officials to analyze economic impacts when deciding whether habitat is critical to a species’ survival, a shift critics say gives corporations an opportunity to influence habitat decisions.
Noah Greenwald with the Center for Biological Diversity said, "If you're exempting certain industries that cause habitat destruction, in many instances you'll be exempting the main threat to those species."
Officials made similar regulatory changes during Trump’s first term that were later reversed under former President Joe Biden, and the rules that provided blanket protections to threatened species were first adopted for wildlife in 1975 and for plants in 1977.
In March, the administration exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said environmentalists’ lawsuits threatened to hobble domestic energy supplies as the U.S. wages war against Iran.
Last week, Interior officials narrowed the definition of what constitutes "harm" to a species, a change that would allow development on critical wildlife habitat so long as the animals are not immediately killed or injured. This week officials sharply reduced the amount of critical habitat designated for Canada lynx in the U.S. Rocky Mountains, and Burgum said during a visit to Montana that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would turn over more management authority for grizzly bears to the states where they live.
The Endangered Species Act has been credited with bringing back species including the bald eagle and the American alligator from the brink of extinction.