In a long line of attacks since January, the Trump administration has sought to justify the ESA rollback by blaming strict federal rules for development slowdowns and barriers to what he calls “energy domination.” This year, the president has issued orders that direct agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that would speed fossil fuel projects and weaken environmental reviews.

Critics like Burgum, and other conservatives, say the law is failing at its core purpose. Because recovery criteria are so rigid, they argue, ESA protections do little to ensure that species rebound. Scientists and legal experts say the real issue is one of insufficient funding, an ongoing problem that has dogged the law for years, combined with the on-again, off-again nature of the political will to protect species.

“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.”

Despite the law’s critics, experts say, it is critical to remember the ESA has averted catastrophic extinctions. Since 1973, just 26 species on the federal government’s watch have gone extinct. At least 47 more are believed to have vanished even as they awaited 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.”

The ESA’s biggest conservation success story may be the bald eagle. By the 1960s, a nation steeped in the image of the bird was shocked to learn that only a few hundred nesting pairs remained in the lower 48 states, a number that had been driven down by habitat loss and exposure to the pesticide DDT. In 1978, the bald eagle received federal protection under the ESA, and the ban on DDT in 1972 was made permanent. As a result, the eagle’s numbers grew steadily. By 2007, the bird was delisted, with nearly 10,000 nesting pairs nationwide.

Other species—from American alligators to the Steller sea lion—have benefited from targeted protections.

Conservation Challenges on Private Lands

The ESA covers public and private property, which has long been a sore point in ESA policy. More than two-thirds of all species on the list depend on private lands for habitat. For species that have become known as “pure privates,” like the dusky gopher frog, that can be a problem; as much as 10 percent of the listed species are thought to exist only on private lands.

“You can’t have oil or gas wells on it, you can’t build on it, 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.”

Research on some species has found that private landowners have “perverse incentives” to help threatened species, including killing off those species so that they can later make a legal claim to be undisturbed habitat. In one study, researchers looking at red-cockaded woodpeckers saw that timber harvesting in areas where the birds lived occurred early in a parcel’s life, possibly to preempt federal habitat restrictions.

Congress has attempted to provide incentives over the years, through tax breaks and conservation easements that pay landowners for protecting habitats. But such programs have shrunk in recent years, leading many conservationists to worry.

The Future of the ESA

The ESA once drew bipartisan support, and the Trump administration is not the first to try to loosen the law. During George W. Bush’s administration, for example, he tried to rewrite ESA habitat protections, and some climate change regulations put in place by the Obama administration were delayed by Congress. Those decisions have been reversed since.

But experts today say the combination of the Trump administration’s aggressive regulatory rollbacks and a conservative Supreme Court majority could have a long-lasting impact on the scope of the ESA. Climate change and ongoing habitat loss also continue to push more species to crisis levels.

Harvard Law School’s Andrew Mergen, who worked for more than three decades litigating ESA cases for the Justice Department, said the law doesn’t need to be rolled back to improve recovery. “The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

Conservationists are still waiting to see how some key ESA-related court cases will be decided this year and next, including an effort by New Mexico, Idaho and Wyoming to block federal endangered species protections for sage grouse.

A Glimpse of Hope

For all the posturing on the ESA, there have also been some recent success stories to point to. In July, for instance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish native to Virginia, has recovered sufficiently to be taken off the endangered species list. Burgum seized on the news as “proof” that the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

But some conservationists note that recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, and costly reintroduction efforts—all measures and goals that were put in place long before Trump’s election.

“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.”