For at least two years, the Trump administration has been bashing the ESA, claiming the law’s heavy-handed regulations deter development and keep the United States from achieving “energy domination.” In a pair of executive orders issued this year, the White House instructed federal agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that could fast-track fossil fuel and energy infrastructure, sidestepping environmental reviews that are often required.

Conservatives like Burgum have long painted the law as ineffective, too focused on prevention rather than incentivizing recovery. Species experts and legal scholars say the problem is actually that the ESA has been chronically underfunded and subject to political whiplash.

“The simple fact is that 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. “And that makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

While conservationists and biologists agree the ESA has room to improve, most point out that the law has done a good job of stemming extinctions.

Only 26 species or subspecies on the federal list have gone extinct since 1973, while at least 47 listed species are believed to have vanished while awaiting a listing. To date, 99 percent of the 1,669 species that received protections at some point under the ESA have been saved from federal extinction, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

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

A prime example is the iconic bald eagle. In the 1960s, the national bird was in a death spiral. Widespread use of the pesticide DDT and habitat loss had left just a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. Numbers started to recover in 1972, when the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT. By 1978, the bald eagle had landed on the endangered list, and recovery plans were implemented. Habitat protections, law enforcement, and other actions quickly ramped up under the ESA. By 2007, the bird was officially delisted. As of 2019, there are nearly 10,000 nesting pairs in the lower 48.

American alligators, which the Fish and Wildlife Service listed as endangered in 1967, also make an impressive comeback story. Black-footed ferrets, condors, the Florida panther, Steller sea lions, and whooping cranes are just some of the other species to make significant recoveries because of targeted protections.

The ESA also covers both public and private property, a fact that has long been a point of contention. More than two-thirds of all listed species are found on private land. For about 10 percent, private land is their only habitat.

“Your ability to use that land is going to be limited and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary. “And that discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Studies show these kinds of rules can create “perverse incentives.” Research on the red-cockaded woodpecker, for example, found that timber was harvested earlier in forests where the bird lived, likely to pre-empt the bird’s inevitable listing and subsequent federal habitat restrictions.

Over the years, Congress has crafted some programs aimed at giving landowners an incentive to help conserve habitat on private lands, including tax breaks and conservation easements, which essentially pay landowners for protecting a species’ habitat. Such programs, however, have declined in recent years.

The Endangered Species Act has long enjoyed bipartisan support, but it has also become one of the most litigated environmental laws in American history. Efforts to weaken it have come under several Republican administrations, only to be reversed when the political winds shifted.

But this time around, experts say, the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of protections combined with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court could lead to permanent damage. This all comes as climate change and habitat loss are pushing more species into peril.

Andrew Mergen, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School who has spent more than two decades litigating ESA cases, said the fight now should be about resources rather than deregulation.

“The law has prevented extinctions. And we’ve done that time and again,” he said. “The real challenge is do we commit enough money and political will to make species recover, not to dismantle the protections that keep them alive.”

Politics aside, the recovery of one recently delisted species has offered a glimpse of what’s possible. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, has recovered enough to be taken off the endangered list. Burgum celebrated the delisting as “proof” the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

But conservationists point out the recovery took more than 30 years of dam removals, wetland restoration, and a costly reintroduction effort—an investment that got going long before the Trump administration. The takeaway, said Wilcove, is that the country knows how to save species if it’s willing to pay for it.

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