The ESA, which critics have repeatedly targeted since the start of Trump’s presidency, protects species at risk of extinction. In recent months, the administration has issued several executive orders mandating agencies to change ESA rules, opening the door to easier approval of fossil fuel projects without the usual environmental reviews.

Burgum and other conservative critics portray the ESA as broken. Its strict rules, they say, do little to aid recovery. Scientists and legal scholars say the real problem isn’t the ESA but underfunding and political whiplash.

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

A Record of Prevention, Not Just Recovery

Conservation experts say the ESA has a strong track record of preventing extinction. Since 1973, just 26 species have become extinct while on the federal government’s protected list, which includes endangered and threatened species. By contrast, at least 47 species have disappeared after years of waiting for a listing, Wilcove said.

“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.”

One of the ESA’s most celebrated successes is the bald eagle. The widespread use of DDT and habitat loss had left only a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states by the 1960s. Numbers slowly rebounded after DDT was banned and the bird was added to the ESA list in 1978, and by 2007 it was delisted, with more than 10,000 pairs counted nationwide.

Scores of other species have also recovered thanks to specific protections, including the American alligator and the Steller sea lion.

Challenges on Private Lands

Species protections extend to both public and private lands, which has long fueled political disputes. More than two-thirds of species on the ESA list depend on private land for survival, while roughly 10 percent are found on private lands only, according to the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife.

“The government is saying your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have even found these rules create “perverse incentives” for landowners to avoid helping. For instance, one study looking at red-cockaded woodpeckers, a threatened bird, found that timber was harvested earlier on parcels of forest where the woodpecker was present, likely as a preemptive strike to avoid federal habitat protections.

Congress has tried over the years to pass tax breaks and other incentives to landowners for conservation, as well as conservation easements that pay landowners to preserve habitat. But these programs have eroded over the last decade, conservationists say.

The Future of the ESA

The ESA used to be widely viewed as a bipartisan achievement. But for decades, lawmakers have attempted to change or water down parts of the act. Only when leadership changed, they have been reversed.

Now many experts fear the Trump administration’s aggressive rollbacks and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court will permanently curtail the ESA’s reach. And with climate change and habitat loss quickly driving more species to crisis levels, conservationists are concerned.

Andrew Mergen, who retired last year from the Department of Interior after 35 years of litigating ESA cases and is now at Harvard Law School, argues more money should be poured into habitat conservation, research and reintroduction, not undoing of habitat protections. “The law has prevented extinctions,” Mergen said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

While the ESA’s future remains mired in politics, recent news out of the Fish and Wildlife Service has offered a glimmer of hope. In July, it announced the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, has recovered enough to be removed from the endangered list, and Burgum and other Republicans have touted it as evidence the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

Conservationists say the recovery is a welcome news but note that it took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, research and costly reintroduction efforts to get to this point—all under way well before Trump entered office.

“The optimistic part,” Wilcove said, “is that we know how to save species when we invest in them. The question is whether we’ll make that commitment.”