Photo by Ali Bayless, NOAA/NMFS/PIFSC (CC BY 2.0).
Sierra Club and partners recently won an important legal victory to protect the Endangered Species Act. This is a major step forward in fighting back against regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration aimed at undermining protections for threatened and endangered species.
Why is the Endangered Species Act important?
Defending the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is more important than ever. Over one-third of plants and animals in the US are at risk of extinction, in large part due to human activities that destroy habitat, overexploit and kill species, pollute water systems, and speed up climate change.
Meanwhile, the ESA remains one of the most popular and effective conservation laws ever enacted in the US, with 84 percent of Americans in support of it today. The ESA has had a 99 percent success rate at preventing extinction saving species such as the bald eagle from disappearing forever. Humans also benefit immensely from the bedrock environmental law, which helps keep ecosystems intact that impact everything from agriculture to clean water access and disease prevention.
Why did the Sierra Club sue to defend the Endangered Species Act?
Starting in 2019, the first Trump administration carried out a series of unprecedented attacks against the ESA. These rollbacks moved the law away from its grounding in sound science that has made it so effective.
It opened the door to political decisions—for example, by allowing economic impacts to influence whether or not to protect a species. After Sierra Club and partners sued to challenge those changes, the Biden administration fixed many of the Trump rollbacks, but left a number of disastrous provisions in place. Sierra Club and allies sued again to challenge those provisions.
What was the result of the lawsuit?
On March 30, 2026 the federal district court for the Northern District of California found that the worst of these provisions were in clear violation of the ESA, and reinstated the pre-2019 versions. The court decided that these Trump administration changes were unlawful:
- Allowing incremental destruction of wildlife habitat that is essential to the recovery of a species,
- Allowing federal agencies to purposefully ignore any harmful impacts of their actions (like the impacts of building a road through wildlife habitat), and
- Allowing federal agencies to rely on empty promises that they would reduce any harm that they caused to a species or its habitat.
What happens now?
The Trump administration may soon appeal the district court’s decision. But for now, the ruling remains in place. In addition to eliminating a number of harmful provisions, the decision reinforces the ESA’s ability to ensure that federal agencies' actions do not jeopardize protected species or hurt their critical habitat.
How is the current Trump administration attacking the Endangered Species Act?
The Biden administration took some steps to reverse some of the Trump 1.0 rollbacks. Since taking office, the current Trump administration has tried to undo that work by proposing rules to reinstate its original attacks on the ESA.
Worse yet, the Trump administration has undertaken even more extreme actions aimed at gutting the most fundamental of the ESA’s protections. The Trump administration has proposed to reverse a 50-year understanding of the ESA in an attempt to open the door to widespread destruction of habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife. This change may be finalized soon, even though it has been met with fierce public and scientific opposition.
Trump also issued an executive order on the first day of his new term declaring an “energy emergency” that specifically named the ESA, setting up an effort to eventually undermine the law in the name of fossil fuel extraction and private corporate interests.
Additionally, the Secretary of Interior recently invoked a rarely used ESA provision to convene the Endangered Species Committee (also known as the "God Squad" or "Extinction Committee") and issue an exemption of Endangered Species Act compliance for all oil and gas activities in the Gulf of Mexico. On March 31, 2026, that committee voted to dismantle ESA protections for nearly two dozen species in the Gulf of Mexico based on the Secretary of Defense’s determination that “national security” required it. This decision could condemn the world's most endangered whale to extinction as well as impact other endangered whales, sea turtles, sharks, manta rays, coral reefs, fish, and more. Sierra Club and allies are challenging the decision in court.