The Trump administration has taken repeated swipes at the ESA since January. White House officials argue that the law’s strict rules have impeded development and blocked “energy domination.” This year’s executive orders on the law direct agencies to rewrite ESA regulations in ways that could speed fossil fuel projects and sidestep environmental reviews.

Burgum and other conservatives also criticize the law for failing to promote recovery, saying its rules are too rigid to be effective. Many scientists and legal experts, however, say the ESA’s problem is not the regulations themselves but decades of underfunding and inconsistent political support.

“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.”

Critics sometimes focus on the number of species that have actually recovered and been delisted. In fact, scientists and legal experts emphasize that the ESA has also kept vast numbers of species from going extinct. While 26 species that were listed have gone extinct under federal protection since 1973, at least 47 species are believed to have disappeared without ever being listed, says Wilcove.

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

The most famous success story is the bald eagle. Habitat loss and the widespread use of the pesticide DDT had reduced the iconic bird to a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in the 1960s. Numbers increased after DDT was banned and the bald eagle received ESA protections in 1978. By 2007, the species had recovered enough to be delisted, with nearly 10,000 pairs thriving nationwide.

American alligators, gray whales, and Steller sea lions are other examples of species that have bounced back under the ESA’s protections.

Challenges on Private Lands

The ESA applies to public and private land, which has long been a source of controversy. More than two-thirds of listed species need to live on private lands at some point, and about 10 percent are found there only. With that, conservationists face limitations.

“If it’s private land, your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor of environmental law at William & Mary. “That certainly discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Studies have also found that rules for the ESA sometimes create “perverse incentives.” For instance, research on the red-cockaded woodpecker found that timber was more likely to be harvested early in areas where the woodpecker was living, probably to preempt federal habitat restrictions.

Congress has created incentives such as tax breaks and conservation easements, which compensate landowners for protecting habitat. These programs have grown in recent years but have declined in the past decade.

The Future of the ESA

The Endangered Species Act was once popular on both sides of the aisle, but the ESA is now one of the most litigated environmental laws in the country. Presidents have made efforts to weaken it at least as far back as the Reagan administration, but most major rollbacks were eventually reversed when administrations changed.

Today, critics fear the Trump administration’s aggressive push to roll back protections—and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court—may result in permanently hollowing out the ESA. As with other conservation efforts, the looming challenges of climate change and habitat loss will only make it more difficult to prevent species from nearing crisis levels.

Andrew Mergen, an environmental and natural resources law professor at Harvard Law School who spent 22 years litigating ESA cases at the Interior and Justice departments, said attention should focus on resources rather than deregulation. “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.”

For all the political fighting, the delisting of the Roanoke logperch in July offers a glimmer of hope and what’s possible. Burgum called the freshwater fish’s removal from the endangered list “proof” the ESA is no longer a “Hotel California.”

But conservationists note it took three decades of dam removals, wetland restorations, and reintroduction efforts that cost millions of dollars—programs and partnerships well established before the Trump administration—for the logperch to be delisted.

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