The Trump administration’s revisions to the Endangered Species Act could reshape the process of designating land for declining animals and plants and strip blanket protections for species categorized as threatened.
Some of the changes would return the law to the modifications Trump made during his first term. The Department of the Interior announced the new proposal in November, stating the rules support the administration’s focus on the energy industry.
“These revisions end years of legal confusion and regulatory overreach, delivering certainty to states, tribes, landowners and businesses while ensuring conservation efforts remain grounded in sound science and common sense,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said.
The new rules would create more flexibility for the government not to designate land as a critical habitat based on economic benefits, national security reasons or other grounds. Fish and Wildlife would also have to tailor conservation rules to threatened species instead of allowing a “blanket rule” option to give automatic protections.
Critics of the proposed rules say the environmental rollbacks are more rooted in finance than in conservation.
“Trump’s rules aren’t about improving the Endangered Species Act or recovering imperiled animals and plants,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a news release. “This is about letting the biggest companies in the country drill for oil, log our old-growth trees and mine for coal even if it causes iconic species to go extinct and cheats our children out of their natural heritage.”
Oklahoma is home to more than 20 endangered and threatened species. The whooping crane, red-cockaded woodpecker, several species of bat and four plants are under the listing as of December.
The monarch butterfly, which migrates through Oklahoma in early fall, is currently being considered for federal protection.
Eli Bridge, director of the Oklahoma Biological Survey at the University of Oklahoma, said the proposed changes place the benefit of the doubt into financial interest instead of endangered species. Land that could be suitable for imperiled species in the future may have more difficulty receiving protection.
“Now, the burden of proof is to show that a species is present in an area as opposed to showing that this is habitat that's appropriate for that species, and it's probably there and we should probably protect it,” Bridge said.
One example can be found in the recent discovery of a federally threatened plant species in Oklahoma, Bridge said.
Tiny Tim, a small plant that is mainly visible in early spring, hadn’t been documented in the Sooner State until 2023. A naturalist first identified the plant near Skiatook Lake and searched for more with the help of a botanist at the Biological Survey.
“ It's important that you'd be able to protect habitat even if you're not exactly sure what's there,” Bridge said.
The Endangered Species Act’s rules prevent landowners from killing, trapping, harassing or performing other harmful measures against protected species on Oklahoma’s private lands, which account for 97% of the state. Those actions are known as “take” in the law.
It also keeps people from harming species through habitat disturbance. But another proposal from the Trump administration would alter the law’s definition of “harm,” which could change that rule.
“The existing regulatory definition of ‘harm,’ which includes habitat modification, runs contrary to the best meaning of the statutory term ‘take,’ the proposal reads. “We are undertaking this change to adhere to the single, best meaning of the ESA.”
Conservation organization WWF estimates habitat loss is the primary cause of decline for about 85% of species.
Bridge said it would be difficult to determine which Oklahoma species would be most impacted by the rule changes, but the state needs protections in place for its wide range of ecosystems.
“ Nobody thinks of Oklahoma as having all this biodiversity,” he said. “But if you think about it, in the southeastern corner, we have alligators and swamps. Up in the panhandle, we have high plains and tumbleweeds.”
“So, we have all that biodiversity in between, and it is a pretty special place. It is important we get people to realize it.”
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