Record low number of threatened species get new protections under Trump, zero in second term
Alex Baumhardt
(States Newsroom) President Donald Trump’s administration listed fewer vulnerable species for protection than any other presidential administration since Congress passed the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Trump’s first term added 22 species to the 1,700-species list. So far in his second term, zero new species have made the list. That’s according to a database maintained by the nonprofit conservation group Center for Biological Diversity and an online database maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service, largely responsible for Endangered Species List considerations and enforcement, were unable to answer Capital Chronicle questions by Thursday evening.
Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the numbers are not surprising. The group has been involved in a growing number of lawsuits against the administration for attempts to circumvent the act and for missing statutory deadlines for considering and listing species.
A backlog of roughly 400 species await a federal listing decision, Greenwald said.
“It’s consistent with what other Republican administrations have done, but this administration has just gone so much further in dismantling protections for endangered species,” he said.
On Tuesday, a group of six Trump appointees overseeing federal wildlife, agriculture and environment agencies voted unanimously to remove protections from species threatened by oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. That includes the Rice’s whale, of which there are only 51 left in the world, according to the most recent federal estimate. Conservation groups are suing.
It was only the fourth time since the Endangered Species Act Committee was created in 1978 that the so-called “God Squad” was convened to override federal species’ protections and determine the fate of imperiled species.
Trump last year threatened to invoke the committee’s review of species he said stand in the way of increased logging in federal forests in Oregon.
Greenwald said that the growing backlog of species being considered for listing is also due to a lack of funding for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and massive losses in staff.
The agency lost nearly 20% of its staff in the last year to buyouts, early retirements and other Trump administration policies meant to cut the federal workforce, according to records requested from Biological Diversity.
He said there’s not just an administrative backlog at the federal agencies, but a biological backlog of threatened species in the U.S. likely far greater than 1,700.
“Scientists recognize there are thousands of species that are imperiled in the U.S., and most of those, honestly, there’s just not very much information about. We need to do more study and survey,” he said. “When we get out of this administration, there’s going to be an even bigger backlog.”
Getting listed
Anyone can petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to list a species that might be threatened or on the brink of extinction. By law, the agencies have 90 days to respond to the petition, one year to undertake research and gather findings about whether a listing is warranted or not and one more year to issue a final ruling.
Greenwald said in practice, step one typically takes a year, and steps two and three typically take four to five years each, meaning most species don’t actually get listed until 10 or more years after the request to protect them.
Groups including the Center for Biological Diversity have taken to suing the federal government over its missed deadlines for decades, and Greenwald said federal lawyers almost always settle by agreeing to meet deadlines both parties agree on. The group has been trying for more than a decade to get migratory monarch butterflies listed, which have had an 80% population decline since the late 1990s and sued the Trump administration in February when officials delayed a decision on listing the species that was supposed to be made in December.
Daniel Rohlf, a law professor and director of the Earthwise Law Center at Lewis & Clark University, said long delays in getting species listed isn’t uncommon, but the Trump administration in particular is doing “end-runs around the law.”
Besides declaring an emergency and convening the God Squad, Rohlf said administration officials have slowed down listings by leveraging part of the law that allows officials to categorize species as “warranted but precluded” for protections.
“That is the Fish and Wildlife Service saying: ‘Well, we should list the species as threatened or endangered, but we’re too busy with other higher priority species, so we can’t deal with this species right now,’” he said, describing it as a “purgatory” for species on the brink.
Rohlf and Oregon State University professor Christian Langpap, who studies natural resource economics and the economics of endangered species conservation, said research shows the Endangered Species Act works.
“Despite the controversy that the Endangered Species Act has always been surrounded in, and the conflicting arguments about the effectiveness, the science, empirical research and empirical evidence does seem to suggest that listing species and investing resources and effort in their recovery ultimately is effective,” Langpap said. “If you cut that process off the first step — the listing — then there is a huge opportunity cost.”
Langpap and Rohlf said staff and budget cuts at federal science agencies will make it harder to understand the impacts of species loss.
“It’s going to be hard for us to say what the impacts of not listing many of these species are, because the federal government is deliberately eliminating the science that tells us what’s going on in the world,” Rohlf said.