The ESA has been a frequent target of the Trump administration. Officials have argued that the strict regulations keep the act from delivering on its promises, holding back development and preventing the “energy domination” Trump has promised. The executive orders the administration signed this year both call for agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that would allow fossil fuel projects to be fast-tracked without undergoing the usual environmental review process.

Administration officials and other conservatives argue the law is broken because its rules are so rigid that they do little to help listed species recover. But experts in ecology and the law say the issue is not with the ESA, but instead with perennial underfunding and politically motivated inconsistencies.

“The problem is 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.”

Ecologists and lawyers note that even with the act’s current problems, the ESA has been able to avert mass extinctions. Since 1973, only 26 species under federal jurisdiction have gone extinct while listed. In comparison, at least 47 other species have vanished without ever being given a chance to recover under the ESA.

“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.”

The bald eagle is one of the best-known success stories of the ESA. In the 1960s, only a few hundred pairs nested in the lower 48 states, victims of the pesticide DDT and habitat loss. Numbers have steadily climbed since DDT was banned and the species became protected under the ESA in 1978, and in 2007 it was the first species to be taken off the endangered list after numbers climbed to nearly 10,000 pairs across the country.

The act has seen other recoveries as well, including the American alligator and Steller sea lion, among others.

Challenges on Private Lands

Critics also note the ESA doesn’t distinguish between public and private land, a tenet that causes an ongoing source of friction. More than two-thirds of species on the endangered list depend on private lands, and about 10 percent of all listed species are found only on private property.

“You’re using it for conservation purposes, and your ability to use that land is going to be limited and you can be prosecuted,” Jonathan Adler, a professor of environmental law at William & Mary, said of private lands. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some academic studies have suggested those rules create “perverse incentives” that lead landowners to engage in activities that hurt a protected species. A study in California on red-cockaded woodpeckers, for instance, found timber was more often harvested early in areas where the woodpecker was found, likely as a preemptive strike against federal habitat restrictions.

Congress has created a handful of programs over the years designed to incentivize landowners to cooperate through tax breaks and conservation easements that provide financial compensation to protect landowners. But such programs have largely fallen by the wayside in recent years, frustrating many in conservation circles.

The ESA was once seen as a bipartisan accomplishment, but it has become one of the most litigated environmental statutes in U.S. history. Weakening the act has been a repeated priority for many Republicans. In 2003, Bush signed an executive order directing agencies to rewrite rules to scale back environmental reviews for projects on private land. Obama reversed those changes once in office. Republicans also spent years trying to add language to the defense appropriations bill that would have restricted conservationists from suing over critical habitat on military land.

Experts say the Trump administration’s current assault on the act, as well as a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, could permanently hamstring it. The twin pressures of climate change and development also continue to push more and more species to brink levels.

“The unfortunate part,” said Andrew Mergen, who spent three decades litigating ESA cases and is now the law professor at Harvard, “is that there’s a political will right now to eviscerate the ESA. The law has prevented extinctions. The real challenge is the political will and money to follow through with recovery, not to dismantle the protections that keep them alive.”

A Glimpse of Hope

As political battles rage, however, some recent news provides a glimmer of what can be accomplished. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish in the Appalachian mountains, was being removed from the endangered species list after a successful recovery. Burgum immediately wrote in a tweet that it was “proof” that the ESA is no longer the “Hotel California” he’d described earlier.

But conservationists counter that work began long before Trump, including more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restorations, and other costly reintroduction programs. “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.”