The Endangered Species Act Has Been ‘Warped by Decades of Radical Environmental Litigation,' Says Lawmaker Who Wants to Overhaul It

Yahoo

08-03-2025

The chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources introduced a bill Thursday that seeks substantial revisions to the Endangered Species Act. It's the latest attempt in a decades-long bid by conservatives to remake the ESA. Now, with the current makeup of Congress, some version of a reform to the 52-year-old legislation has a chance of passing into law.
Bruce Westerman (R-AR) presented his ESA Amendments Act of 2025 as a way to make 'critical reforms' to legislation that he says has fallen well short of its promises.
'The Endangered Species Act has consistently failed to achieve its intended goals and has been warped by decades of radical environmental litigation into a weapon instead of a tool,' Westerman said in a statement. 'With the reforms we are introducing today, we can look forward to a future where the ESA works to support the continued abundance of America's rich and diverse wildlife.'
Congress enacted the ESA — which received strong bipartisan support — in 1973 during the Nixon administration. Since then approximately 1,700 species have been listed as threatened or endangered. Critics, including Westerman, say just 3 percent of species ever listed under the ESA have been recovered and subsequently delisted, according to the release. These stats are reflected in a 2023 report by the Property and Environment Research Center that noted the USFWS had recovered 'only' 57 species in 50 years.
Such statistics are a fundamental misrepresentation of conservation efforts, says leading ESA historian, lawyer, and conservationist Lowell Baier.
'What they fail to say, and what everyone fails to recognize, is that with this law in place, [we] protect more species than [we] lose,' says Baier. 'There are hundreds of species that wouldn't be around today but for the ESA. They would've been destroyed.'
Of all the species ever listed by the ESA, noted the USFWS in 2021, 99 percent have avoided extinction. Recovered species include the Columbian white-tailed deer, the bald eagle, the Louisiana black bear, and gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, to name a few.
Baier, who has written three books on the ESA and interviewed the original advocates of the act — including legendary conservation champion John Dingell — says Westerman's bill would make some key improvements to the ESA. A major provision is blocking many of the expensive, frivolous legislation from 'radical environmental groups that litigate all the time,' such as the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project.
The bill would put a cap on how much such attorneys receive in legal fees ('that's wonderful,' says Baier'), require fee transparency, and help deflect the ongoing lawsuits that affect hot-button species like grizzlies and wolves.
'Bruce's law [would] prohibit anyone from challenging the review of a listing during the five-year monitoring period after the species is listed,' says Baier, noting this would also help mitigate lawsuits to reverse delisting. 'Wolves are a perfect example. They've been delisted, and then listed again by court order, then delisted, then listed again. It's just a joke. This prohibits that kind of nonsense.'
Other tenants of Westerman's bill would fundamentally destabilize the ESA, says Baier, who adds that he knows Westerman personally and believes the Arkansas politician genuinely cares about conservation and the environment. The worst part of the bill, says Baier, is requiring economic consideration for a listing.
While economic consideration may sound reasonable at face value, the feds already consider the economic impact when designating critical habitat for a newly listed species. (That's the part that affects landowners who may have a listed species on their property.) The federal government was careful back in the 70s to keep these considerations separate, and Baier says the conservation community has fought this change for years. The reason? It undercuts science-based management.
'The government can't use an economic impact as part of the listing process. Bruce's bill reverses that, and that's absolutely terrible because it will bring all the bugs out of the woodwork. In other words, people who have those species on their ground will fight tooth and nail and throw up every economic excuse in the book as to how that will damage or affect them personally. … The ESA has always been based on science, and science alone. And this reverses that.'
Another issue with the bill is it would introduce duplicative processes (despite stated goals to reduce them) and mandating states get involved in listing processes.
'Different states have different dispositions toward endangered species. Some states hate them, and some states respect the law and deal with them. If the states are involved in the listing process, it's going to derail it because every state has its own bias. And the government said 'No, this is a national issue, it's got to be a uniform standard of science, and the states cannot be involved — in a listing decision. At the critical habitat level, states can be involved, and the law says that. … Informally, the way it really works is that states are involved anyway. Informally that happens anyway, and he's trying to mandatorily put that in the bill, and that's wrong because it drags in all the state biases.'
For years, Republicans have pushed to reduce the red tape associated with ESA listings.
Westerman introduced a streamlined version of the current bill in September during the last Congress. While that bill might've received bipartisan support, this expanded remaking of the ESA Westerman has proposed is likely to receive substantial Democratic opposition in the Senate. Baier also suspects a few Republicans may cross the aisle to side with Democrats in opposition to it. On Jan. 3 — the first day of this Congress — Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) put forth similar provisions in his own ESA amendments. Called the Endangered Species Transparency and Reasonableness Act of 2025, H.B. 180 would also cap attorney fees and require the DOI to maintain a searchable database of federal expenses related to ESA litigation.
By his best rough estimate, Baier puts some version of Westerman's bill at a fifty-fifty chance of passing into law. So far, he says, there have only been three amendments to the ESA and they were all in the 70s. Baier says the trouble with trying to amend the ESA now is that there's now telling what the end result could be.
'If [Westerman] puts that bill on the floor of the House and the Senate, there are going to be all sorts of additions and so forth. Once his committee approves it, he doesn't control what happens … It's going to open it up to all sorts of amendments that people want because their constituents are pushing them to have them. That has been the fear for the last 52 years … Some things in [this] bill are really going to cause a problem.'
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The full legal text of H.B. 1897 is not yet available on Congress.gov and could not be provided by either the House Committee on Natural Resources or Westerman's D.C. office when contacted Friday. In the meantime, a summary of the bills provisions are available here. Westerman could not be reached for comment as of press time.
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, an organization whose mission is to advance America's legacy of conservation, habitat, and access, and which has historically waded into policy issues like this one, declined to comment for this story. Three other hunting, fishing, and conservation organizations contacted for this story also declined to comment.