The Trump Administration Aims to Gut Critical Habitat Protections for Endangered Species

Everyone needs a healthy and safe home. That’s true for humans, and it’s just as true for wildlife. Without adequate, safe habitat, no wildlife species can survive and thrive.

Protecting habitat is especially essential for endangered species — which, by definition, have already been pushed to the edge and have little room for error. Harm to the habitat of an endangered species can easily push the species into extinction. And extinction, of course, is forever.

These realities render senseless a recent proposal by the Trump administration to scrap the Endangered Species Act’s most important protections for endangered species’ habitat. The ESA prohibits harming any endangered species. Since the 1970s, the regulations that implement the ESA have defined the harm prohibited by the act to include significant habitat modification or degradation that actually kills or injures wildlife.

So, for example, if a timber company wants to clearcut a forest where an endangered species lives, and if destroying that habitat would result in death or injury to individuals of the species, then the ESA prohibits that clearcutting. And how could the rule be any other way? If you destroy a species’ habitat, you sentence that species to death just as surely as if you had pointed a gun at it and pulled the trigger.

Extractive and development industries have always resented this ESA rule that prohibits harm to endangered species habitat, because it can get in the way of some of their timber projects, or oil and gas drilling, or dam-building and the like. Industry groups took the issue all the way to the Supreme Court in 1995. Thankfully, the Supreme Court upheld the regulation, and endangered species and their human supporters breathed a sigh of relief.

But that was then and this is now. On April 17, the Trump administration proposed to rescind the ESA regulation that prohibits harm to endangered species habitat. Despite the Supreme Court upholding the regulation 30 years ago, the Trump proposal claims that the regulation misreads the Endangered Species Act and should be revoked.

This senseless and lawless proposal seeks to vaporize the most important protections for species’ habitat under the Endangered Species Act. The main source of harm to wildlife is habitat loss. The number one cause of the biodiversity crisis, in which species extinction rates have drastically increased, is habitat loss. If you don’t protect habitat, you can’t protect wildlife. Yet that is precisely what the Trump administration is proposing to do, for the endangered species that need their shrinking habitat the most and that have the least ability to absorb a drastic decrease in protections.

Remember: There are no do-overs if we get this wrong, because extinction is forever.

This proposal is part of a larger effort by the new administration to reduce and undermine protections for endangered species. President Trump has already suggested multiple times (including in executive orders) the idea of invoking a rarely used committee of government officials known colloquially as the God Squad because of its ability to play God by deciding to waive protections for endangered species in certain circumstances.

President Trump’s Interior Secretary has already suggested that endangered-species protections may be unnecessary because he thinks scientists like the team that recently publicized their geoengineered ‘dire wolves’ will simply recreate facsimiles of endangered species in a lab. It is profoundly easier to prevent a species from going extinct in the first place.

None of this makes sense. None of it is legal. And none of it honors the sacred duty of stewardship handed down to us by our ancestors so we can preserve these endangered species for our children and our children’s children.

If the Trump administration finalizes this proposal to delete the ESA’s most important protections for endangered species, Earthjustice will do what it does best: we will see them in court.