Since January, the Trump administration has regularly assailed the ESA, which it claims imposes stifling regulations that prevent economic development and “energy domination.” Orders this year have instructed agencies to rewrite ESA regulations in ways that would expedite fossil fuel projects by short-circuiting environmental reviews and other obstacles.

Burgum and other conservatives portray the law as a failure that offers little in the way of recovery. But many scientists and legal experts say the real problem is underfunding and political fickleness.

“The thing that’s consistent is inconsistency, and the law is really a victim of that,” said Andrew Mergen, a clinical professor at Harvard Law School who spent two decades as a litigator for the Interior and Justice departments.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, an ecology professor at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

A Record of Prevention, Not Just Recovery

Critics often claim the ESA is a failure because few species recover enough to be removed from the endangered list. But experts say this misses the point, noting the ESA’s main purpose is to prevent extinctions from happening in the first place.

Wilcove, who has analyzed ESA successes and failures for decades, said that since 1973, 26 species have gone extinct while under federal protection. In comparison, at least 47 species are believed to have disappeared from the wild while awaiting a listing.

“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” Wilcove said. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”

That is especially true for species like the bald eagle, the ESA’s poster child. In the 1960s, habitat loss and the pesticide DDT left the majestic bird with just a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. But after DDT was banned and the eagle gained ESA protections in 1978, recovery programs helped numbers climb steadily. By 2007, bald eagles were removed from the endangered list, with more than 10,000 pairs nationwide.

American alligators, Steller sea lions, and many other species have also made rebounds after receiving targeted protections. According to the Service’s latest report, between 1973 and 2020, more than 99 percent of listed species saw their status improve in some way.

The ESA guarantees protections on both public and private property. This has long been a sticking point, and nearly all of the threatened wolves Burgum has seen on private land in recent years were removed.

“The moment you list that species,” Adler said, “your ability to use that land is going to be limited and you can be prosecuted. That’s not great for landowner buy-in.”

In fact, research has suggested ESA rules may create “perverse incentives” for landowners to preempt habitat regulations by overharvesting the very resources the ESA is meant to protect. A study of red-cockaded woodpeckers found timber was more likely to be harvested early in places where the species was found, probably to avoid federal habitat restrictions.

Over the years, Congress has tried to sweeten the deal with tax breaks and other incentives like conservation easements, which provide landowners with financial compensation in exchange for managing land in a certain way. However, those programs have been in decline in recent years.

For most of its history, the ESA had bipartisan support. But it has also become one of the most litigated environmental laws in the U.S. As soon as one administration started weakening it, the next would reverse course and fight to maintain the existing regulations.

Today, with the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of the ESA’s protections and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, legal experts worry that both laws and regulations that have guided the act for decades could be permanently curtailed.

Mergen said the ESA was actually meant to be a bipartisan law that would keep Congress from “getting in the weeds” on what each species needed to survive. He likened it to a bridge built in the 1970s that would need retrofitting to support modern traffic.

“The problem is not with the bridge itself,” Mergen said. “The problem is that we’ve never really resourced it adequately, and in the intervening years we’ve piled on an incredible amount of traffic, starting with climate change and habitat loss.”

In practice, that means climate change is throwing wrenches in plans that have protected species for decades. Mergen cited the plight of the gray wolf, for which recovery plans from the ‘80s and ‘90s do not match the modern reality. While numbers have increased, they are also more fragmented than officials had hoped.

A Glimpse of Hope

The past few months have seen political back and forth over the ESA. In July, though, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a freshwater fish had made a comeback great enough to remove it from the endangered list: the Roanoke logperch.

The small, slender fish that lived in fast-moving streams was celebrated as “proof” the ESA was no longer “Hotel California” by Burgum and other conservatives. But conservationists point out that its recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, and costly reintroduction programs—decades of investments launched long before the Trump administration came along.

“The optimistic part,” Wilcove said, “is that we know how to save species when we put our minds and money behind it. The question is whether we have the will to do that.”