The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is one of the most powerful environmental laws ever enacted. It can halt construction, restrict farming and ranching, block energy projects, and place vast areas of private land under federal control. Yet, after more than half a century and billions of dollars in spending, 97% of the species listed as endangered or threatened remain there.
That record is evidence that reform is overdue.
The Trump administration has finalized two commonsense regulations to return the Endangered Species Act to the law Congress actually passed. One restores the distinction between “endangered” and “threatened” species. The other restores the traditional meaning of what it means to “take” an animal.
Environmental activist groups have responded with their customary predictions of catastrophe. The Center for Biological Diversity called the reforms a “death sentence” for monarch butterflies, wolverines, manatees, and other species. Critics claim the administration is gutting protections and inviting extinction.
But the reforms do nothing of the sort. They preserve core prohibitions against wounding or killing protected wildlife. What they eliminate are interpretations that have stretched the statute beyond its text and frequently undermined conservation itself.
Consider the so-called blanket rule. The Endangered Species Act establishes two distinct categories: endangered species, which are in danger of extinction, and threatened species, which are thought likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future. Congress deliberately created this distinction and gave regulators authority to design species-specific protections for threatened wildlife.
The blanket rule erased that distinction by automatically imposing essentially the same restrictions on threatened species as on endangered ones unless regulators created an exception. That one-size-fits-all policy was not mandated by Congress, and it often made little sense.
Trump’s reform restores the statutory structure: Endangered species receive the law’s full protections, while threatened species receive rules tailored to their circumstances.
The Biden administration repeatedly used this approach. When it proposed listing the monarch butterfly as threatened, it exempted routine farming, mowing, ranching, and gardening. Regulators understood that punishing landowners for ordinary activities could discourage them from planting milkweed and maintaining monarch habitat.
Biden officials similarly adopted a tailored rule for the threatened wolverine, allowing forest management and wildfire-prevention work that could protect its habitat from catastrophic fires.
What environmental groups now describe as radical was, in practice, the approach their preferred administration used when confronted with real-world conservation problems.
The Trump administration’s second reform rescinds an expansive regulatory definition of “harm.” The statute prohibits the unauthorized “take” of endangered wildlife and defines that term to include conduct such as hunting, shooting, wounding, killing, trapping, and capturing.
Those words describe affirmative actions directed at animals. But in 1975, federal agencies broadened “harm” to include habitat modification that actually killed or injured wildlife by impairing essential behavior such as breeding, feeding, or sheltering. That interpretation gradually transformed a prohibition against taking animals into an open-ended federal land-use regime.
Private citizens could be punished not for shooting or trapping an animal, but for building a house, grazing cattle, cutting timber, or preparing farmland near an area regulators considered habitat.
Pacific Legal Foundation client Mike Colosi, for example, faced nearly $140,000 in permitting fees to build one home near habitat alleged to be important for the Florida scrub-jay. A Kansas ranching family faced restrictions on grazing because of protections for the lesser prairie-chicken. In California, a farmer was criminally prosecuted after routine land preparation allegedly altered the habitat of the Tipton kangaroo rat.
Such cases show how far the agencies wandered from the law’s original purpose. Rescinding the definition of “harm” does not eliminate habitat protection. The government can still designate critical habitat, require consultation on federal projects, develop recovery plans, and prohibit the direct killing of protected wildlife. It simply prevents agencies from using one word to claim sweeping authority over private land.
CALIFORNIA NEVER
Both reforms restore distinctions Congress placed in the statute. Threatened does not mean endangered, and habitat modification does not necessarily mean taking an animal. Conservation works best when farmers, ranchers, homeowners, and local communities have incentives to cooperate rather than fear federal punishment.
The Endangered Species Act should be judged by how many species recover and leave the list, not by how much land Washington controls or how many projects it stops. Trump’s reforms return the law to that mission.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
