The ESA has become a repeated target of the Trump administration, which has argued since January that overregulation has impeded development and “energy domination.” This year, the administration signed executive orders requiring agencies to rewrite the ESA rules in ways that could hasten approval of fossil fuel projects and could potentially waive environmental reviews.

But Burgum and other conservatives describe the law as having “failed,” its strict rules doing little to ensure recovery. Scientists and legal experts push back, saying that underfunding and inconsistent political will have eroded the ESA’s effectiveness, but the law itself isn’t the problem.

“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

Experts also point out that the ESA’s main effect has not been recovery, but keeping the nation from the mass extinctions that occur in many other countries without such protections. Of more than 1,600 species the ESA has listed as threatened or endangered since 1973, only 26 have gone extinct while under federal protection, while at least 47 more species have gone extinct while awaiting a decision on a listing petition.

“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 biggest success stories of all time is the bald eagle. DDT pesticide use and habitat loss caused the raptor’s population to collapse in the 1960s, leaving only a few hundred breeding pairs in the lower 48 states. After the pesticide was banned and the bird was granted ESA protections in 1978, numbers slowly recovered. In 2007, the bald eagle became the first species taken off the list, with nearly 10,000 pairs across the country.

American alligators and Steller sea lions are other examples of a listing followed by a comeback, after protections were put in place.

Challenges on Private Lands

The ESA also covers private as well as public property, a distinction that has long been a point of contention. More than two-thirds of all species on the list depend on private lands, and about one in 10 rely entirely on those lands.

“Your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor of environmental law at the University of Virginia’s William & Mary Law School. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies of species recovery on private lands have found “perverse incentives.” For instance, a study of the red-cockaded woodpecker found that timber on lands where the bird lived was clear-cut earlier in the logging cycle, likely to avoid federal habitat restrictions.

Congress has created numerous incentives over the years, including tax breaks and conservation easements in which landowners can be compensated for agreeing to protect habitats. But in recent years those programs have been rolled back, leaving many conservationists concerned.

The Future of the ESA

The Endangered Species Act used to be popular across party lines, but it’s become one of the most litigated environmental laws in the country. Efforts to weaken it have been floated under several presidential administrations and then scuttled when a new party took office.

The Trump administration, combined with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, is now seen by many experts as a serious threat to the ESA’s reach. At the same time, a new onslaught of pressures from climate change and habitat loss are pushing many species closer to crisis.

Andrew Mergen, who spent more than two decades litigating ESA cases for Earthjustice before recently becoming a professor at Harvard Law School, says it’s not time to rewrite the law, but to put more resources behind it. “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.”

A Glimpse of Hope

Despite the ongoing political struggles, there’s some recent good news that highlights what’s possible. In July, for instance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared that the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, had recovered enough to be delisted. Burgum cited it as an example that the ESA “used to work” and was no longer “Hotel California.”

But conservationists point out that this recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, and multimillion-dollar reintroduction efforts, all of them launched before Trump became president.

“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.”