A House Natural Resources subcommittee on Tuesday will discuss four Republican bills, including one to overhaul the Endangered Species Act and another renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
The hearing before the Water, Fisheries and Wildlife Subcommittee is set to be a partisan throwdown as Democrats are likely to rip full committee Chair Bruce Westerman’s H.R. 1897, the “ESA Amendments Act of 2025,” which contains troves of reforms Republicans have sought for decades. Democrats warned last year that the Arkansas Republican’s bill would set myriad species on a glide path toward extinction.
Democrats are also poised to lampoon Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s H.R. 276, the “Gulf of America Act of 2025,” to rename the body of water in statute, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to do so on his first day in office.
Westerman’s ESA reform bill is largely a redux of last year’s plan under the same name. In releasing the measure, he argued that the ESA “has been warped by decades of radical environmental litigation into a weapon instead of a tool.”
