How Trump and Congress Are Attacking the Endangered Species Act – and What You Can Do

On Earth Day, the U.S. House of Representatives planned to vote on a bill to drastically weaken the Endangered Species Act. Earthjustice and our coalition of wildlife and environmental advocates worked to sound the alarm bells, and the vote on the “ESA Amendments Act” was cancelled for lack of support. A big victory – but this threat to one of our most successful bedrock environmental laws could still return.

For over 55 years, the Endangered Species Act has prevented thousands of plant and animal species from disappearing, including bald eagles, gray wolves, grizzly bears, and humpback whales. It’s no surprise that 84% of Americans support this monumental conservation law.

But right now, at a time when species worldwide are facing the greatest extinction crisis in modern history, the law itself is facing an unprecedented array of threats to its own survival. Extractive industries have powerful allies in the White House and Congress. They’ve launched an onslaught of attacks to gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA):

Undermining habitat protections

The ESA explicitly prohibits enacting harm to an endangered species’ habitat. The law defines “harm” as any action that includes significant habitat modification or degradation that actually kills or injures wildlife. This is common sense, since habitat loss is the leading cause of extinction.

However, last April, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would redefine “harm” to exclude harm to habitat.

What the White House is trying to do is pave the way for timber, oil, mining, and other extractive industries, as well as the government and individuals, to destroy habitat where endangered species live, even if the damage to habitat harms those species. This senseless proposal has no scientific or legal basis – and it directly contradicts a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the ESA’s definition of harm over 30 years ago.

A grizzly bear in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming. (Scott Suriano / Getty Images)

Death by a thousand cuts

The administration is also advancing a separate set of proposed rules that would erode the Endangered Species Act in multiple ways.

These would:

• Eliminate the automatic protections that kick in when a species is listed as threatened – potentially leaving animals like the Florida manatee and monarch butterfly vulnerable to killing and trapping for years.
• Narrow the definition of “critical habitat” to exclude currently unoccupied but historic habitat. Historic habitat is vital for the recovery of imperiled species, especially as the areas where they currently live shrink due to the rapidly changing climate and the chain effects of ongoing biodiversity loss.
• Allow “economic considerations” in decisions about whether to protect species that are scientifically shown to be at risk of extinction. With this rule, the federal government could decide against protecting an endangered species after considering lost revenue from prohibiting a golf course or hotel development to be built where the species lives.

In a migration that takes at least four generations to complete, monarch butterflies make their way 2,500 miles across North America from Mexico to Canada. (Lisa Brown / CC BY-NC 2.0)

A bill targeting threatened species

The House was set to vote on the “ESA Amendments Act of 2025”, which aimed to:

• Upend the scientific consultation process that has successfully guided American species protection for over 50 years
• Significantly slow listings while fast-tracking the removal of listed species
• Enable increased exploitation of threatened species while shifting their management from federal agencies to states

Then advocates across the U.S. spoke up for wildlife. People reached out to their members of Congress about the threat this legislation posed to their local economies, their cultural connections to nature, and to beloved wildlife in every region of the country. Facing shaky support, Republican leaders called off the vote.

However, this bill could come back to the House floor. Earthjustice is monitoring the situation and preparing to rally our supporters to defend the ESA again.

A California spotted owl in the Plumas National Forest in Northern California. (Jamie Chambers / USDA Forest Service)

The big picture: A blueprint for extinction

Each of these actions is part of a broader effort by extractive industries and their political allies to eviscerate endangered species’ protections.

Earlier this month, the administration assembled the “God Squad” to give the oil and gas industry free rein to harm and kill endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico – a blanket exemption that could serve as a death sentence for imperiled marine life, including Rice’s whales, of which fewer than 100 remain. The ESA Amendments Act would codify and expand this reckless type of exemption for industry from the most basic protections for imperiled wildlife – yet another reason to oppose the harmful bill.

Trump has also targeted America’s fisheries: Last summer, he abruptly withdrew from a landmark deal to restore Columbia River Basin fisheries, upending plans to save salmon and steelhead populations veering toward extinction.

These are not isolated incidents – they are a blueprint for extinction.

A Rice’s whale photographed in the Gulf of Mexico. (Lisa Conger and Beth Josephson / NOAA Fisheries / Permit #21938)

Earthjustice is fighting back

We have successfully defended the ESA and the species it protects for over 50 years. We’re not backing down now:

• We’re suing the administration for granting an illegal and unjustified ESA exemption to greenlight fossil fuel drilling in the Gulf.
• In April, we won a seven-year legal battle to restore ESA protections that the first Trump administration attacked. This win reaffirms that federal agencies must use the best available science when assessing harm to species and cannot ignore harm to habitat.
• We returned to court to protect imperiled Columbia Basin salmon after the Trump administration torpedoed a historic agreement to restore the basin’s fisheries. We won a preliminary injunction that ordered increased spill over the dams to help improve salmon survival.