Conservationists and legal experts say any recovery under the Endangered Species Act, or ESA, is made all the more difficult by the Trump administration’s frequent attempts to weaken the law. Since January, it has used executive orders to pressure agencies to rewrite the ESA’s rules in ways that could speed approval of fossil fuel projects while short-circuiting required environmental reviews.

Under Trump, Burgum and other conservatives argue the law is broken, saying strict regulations and rules in place to protect threatened species often do little to help them recover and survive. But scientists and legal scholars say the ESA is not the problem. If anything, they argue, the law’s main weakness is a chronic lack of funding and political will.

“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.”

The Law Is Saving Species, If We Give It Time

Critics often point to the small number of species that the ESA has delisted as proof that it’s not working. But experts say the law has a better track record of preventing extinctions than allowing for recovery.

The number of species that have gone extinct under the ESA’s protection is low: 26 in all, since 1973. By comparison, at least 47 other species are believed to have died out without ever being listed for protection, according to federal records.

“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” said Wilcove, the Princeton professor. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”

Saving the Bald Eagle

The ESA’s most famous success story: the bald eagle. In the 1960s and ’70s, habitat loss and the use of the pesticide DDT left only a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. After DDT was banned and the bird received ESA protections in 1978, their numbers steadily rose. In 2007, the bald eagle was delisted from the ESA, with almost 10,000 pairs flourishing nationwide.

American alligators, Steller sea lions and several bird and reptile species have also made a comeback due to the targeted protections of the ESA.

One of the thorniest questions of the ESA is its protections on private land. The law’s scope of jurisdiction applies equally to public and private property, which has long been a flashpoint of conflict.

“The minute a species shows up on your property, 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.”

Studies suggest such restrictions create “perverse incentives,” too. For example, research on timber harvesting and red-cockaded woodpeckers, a protected species, found that timber was more likely to be harvested early in woodlots where the woodpecker lived, likely to beat federal habitat restrictions.

Congress has attempted to address landowner concerns with a variety of incentives over the years. These include everything from tax breaks and conservation easements that allow for some development to outright compensation for protecting and maintaining habitats. But some of these programs have been cut in recent years, conservationists fear.

The ESA is more likely to be reformed than saved

The ESA enjoyed bipartisan support in the past, but it is now one of the most litigated environmental laws in the nation. Several administrations have made attempts to chip away at the ESA, only to back down when the political winds shifted. The focus on rolling back rules continued under Trump.

“What’s really new and different is we have an administration that is very much pursuing an agenda to weaken the law,” said Andrew Mergen, who spent 23 years at the Justice Department litigating ESA cases, and is now a professor at Harvard Law School.

Today, the combination of an aggressive Trump administration and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court has some experts fearing the ESA’s reach will be permanently reduced. Climate change and habitat loss are only driving more species into crisis mode, they say.

“The law has prevented extinctions,” said Mergen. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

A Recovery Is Possible

Despite all the political fighting, recent announcements on species that are being delisted from the ESA show some progress is possible. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Roanoke logperch, an endangered freshwater fish, had recovered enough to be removed from the endangered species list. Burgum praised the move as “proof” that the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

But the logperch’s recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration and costly reintroduction efforts that were launched long before the Trump administration. And the species had made a significant comeback long before it was delisted.

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