Washington, United States | AFP | Muser NewsDesk
President Donald Trump‘s administration on Friday finalized two more rules curbing the landmark Endangered Species Act, further diminishing the power of a law credited with saving iconic animals such as the grizzly bear and bald eagle.
One of the actions rescinds the so-called “blanket rule” that by default applied endangered species protections to those listed as “threatened.”
The other requires the government to consider economic and national security tradeoffs when deciding whether to designate a particular area as “critical habitat.”
The Interior Department said in a statement that taken together, the changes would strengthen American energy independence and ensure federal actions align with the “best reading of the law.”
“For too long, the Endangered Species Act has been weaponized to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.
But conservation groups argued the changes would prove catastrophic for endangered plants and animals and vowed to challenge them in court.
“This is just a disaster for endangered species across the country,” Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity told AFP, adding it was yet another example of the “administration’s kowtowing to industry and undermining protections for our air, for our water, for our wildlife, for our climate.”
The so-called “blanket rule” that by default afforded threatened species the same protections as endangered has been in place since 1975 — two years after the passage of the law — said Greenwald, and helped ease the burden on the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which had the option of tailoring specific rules to a species if it wished.
Greenwald said the changes to the “critical habitat” designations now require FWS to accept at face value claims by corporations and landowners about a piece of land’s economic value.
“The way this is written, a landowner could falsely claim they planned to build the next Disneyland on their property so designating critical habitat would supposedly cost them tens of millions of dollars,” he said.
The latest changes come after the Interior Department changed the definition of “harm” as it relates to endangered species to exclude habitat destruction, and another rule that would allow more killing of grizzly bears in areas where it said their population had sufficiently recovered.
In 2023, Interior Department under the Biden administration credited the Endangered Species Act with saving hundreds of species from extinction over the past five decades.
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© Agence France-Presse
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Press Release/Material by AFP
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