The Trump administration redefined how the federal government will interpret a key word in the Endangered Species Act on Friday, narrowing the protections afforded to wildlife in the bedrock environmental law.
The move focuses on the word “harm” in the ESA, which prohibits injuring or killing any species that the federal government determines to be endangered or threatened. The Interior Department announced Friday afternoon that the change had been finalized, but the regulation was not yet in the Federal Register.
Under the change laid out last year, regulators with the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries will no longer interpret “harm” of a protected species to include modifications to a plant or animal’s habitat that could be detrimental to its survival.
Trump administration officials have argued that the more expansive interpretation — which has been in place nearly as long as the 1973 law — does not meet the original intent of the Endangered Species Act.
“For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use and burden American families and businesses,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a news release. “This action restores common sense, respects private property, provides much-needed certainty for landowners and follows the statute Congress actually passed.”
Conservationists have countered the policy change will allow for oil and gas exploration, mining, logging, and other extractive industries to ravage the habitats of imperiled species, which they say will doubtless hurt or kill the species themselves.
“For more than four decades, the definition of ‘harm’ recognized a simple truth: if you destroy the places wildlife need to survive, you are putting species on a path to extinction,” said Ben Greuel, the wildlife campaign manager at the Sierra Club. “This rule ignores that reality in an unlawful attempt to open the door for corporate polluters to degrade vitally important habitats, wildlife be damned.”
The issue of how expansively to interpret the ESA was debated for years in the federal courts, rising all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 1995, after the timber industry challenged the inclusion of habitat in federal agencies’ definition of “harm,” the court ruled 6-3 that the government was correct.
Then-Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion that the dictionary definition of harm includes hurt, damage and injury.
“In the context of the ESA, that definition naturally encompasses habitat modification that results in actual injury or death to members of an endangered or threatened species,” Stevens wrote.
The ruling also deferred to the agency’s interpretation of the ESA, employing a Supreme Court doctrine known as Chevron deference that held judges should defer to an agency’s view of a law when the statute is ambiguous.
But the Supreme Court overruled that framework in 2024 in a case called Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which the Interior and the Commerce Department cited in a news release Friday. That ruling said judges must interpret the text of laws when evaluating federal regulations.
In a joint news release, the Interior and Commerce, which oversees NOAA Fisheries, said their interpretation of the ESA returns the law to the “single best meaning of a statute rather than contorting laws to fit political agendas.”
Endangered and threatened species will still retain their “core protections,” the news release said, as the ESA prohibits direct injury to listed species.
