The Interior and Commerce Departments moved Friday to scrap a decades-old regulatory definition that broadened the Endangered Species Act's reach into private land use, energy production, and timber harvesting, a provision senior officials say federal agencies "weaponized" to block lawful economic activity far beyond anything Congress intended.
The rescission eliminates the regulatory definition of "harm" under Section 9 of the ESA, which since 1981 had been interpreted to include habitat modification that kills or injures protected wildlife. The agencies did not replace it with a new definition, effectively narrowing enforcement to actions that directly injure or kill a listed species.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum framed the move as long overdue relief for ordinary Americans caught in a regulatory trap. In an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital, Burgum laid out the administration's case in blunt terms:
"For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use and burden American families and businesses. That approach turned routine activity into a regulatory trap, drove up costs that impacted people's lives, and expanded federal authority beyond what Congress intended."
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed that position, saying the action removes regulations that have restrained American fishermen for "too long." Newsmax reported Lutnick described the change as one that "restores common sense, respects private property, provides much-needed certainty for landowners and follows the statute Congress actually passed."
The rule the administration dismantled had been on the books in some form for half a century. Under the ESA, enacted in 1973 and credited with helping save species including the bald eagle, whooping crane, and gray wolf, it is unlawful to "take" endangered wildlife. Congress defined "take" to include harming, harassing, wounding, or killing protected species. But federal regulators extended "harm" to cover significant habitat modification, a reading the Supreme Court upheld in 1995 when it ruled in favor of Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in a case brought by timber interests and landowners.
That broad reading had real-world consequences that stretched across decades and entire regional economies.
The northern spotted owl's ESA listing in 1990 triggered a long battle over timber harvesting in the Pacific Northwest. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management estimated that listing alone reduced timber employment by roughly 16,000 to 32,000 jobs across the Pacific Northwest and northern California. Entire communities built around the timber industry watched their livelihoods vanish, not because someone killed an owl, but because regulators decided that logging near owl habitat counted as "harm."
The pattern repeated elsewhere. The Biden administration listed the dunes sagebrush lizard as endangered in 2024, a move officials say unnecessarily restricted energy projects in the Permian Basin of Texas, the same oil-rich region depicted in the television series Landman. Across New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, the lesser prairie-chicken's federal protections drew opposition from farmers, ranchers, and energy developers who found their operations tangled in compliance costs and permitting delays.
The administration's broader push for domestic energy production has already drawn legal resistance from federal courts on other fronts, making the ESA rescission another front in a widening regulatory battle.
Administration officials pointed to the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo as a key legal basis for the change. That ruling overturned the longstanding doctrine of "Chevron deference," which had allowed federal agencies to impose their own preferred reading of ambiguous statutes. Under Loper Bright, courts must now use independent judgment when interpreting federal law rather than rubber-stamping an agency's interpretation.
Officials said the rule change aims to align regulations with the "single best" meaning of the statute rather than letting it be "contorted to fit a political agenda." In practical terms, the rescission strips away the regulatory layer that allowed agencies to treat habitat modification as equivalent to directly killing a protected animal.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik stressed that core ESA protections remain intact, including prohibitions on directly injuring or killing protected wildlife:
"This administration is committed to protecting wildlife using Gold Standard Science, the law and the tools Congress actually gave us. We can protect species and respect communities at the same time."
That framing, protecting species without crushing communities, sits at the heart of the administration's argument. The question is whether courts will agree.
Environmental organizations immediately vowed legal action. Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles offered one of the sharpest critiques:
"For the first time ever, a presidential administration now claims that species protected by the Endangered Species Act shouldn't be safe from habitat modification that destroys where they live, raise their young, or search for food."
That line of attack will likely anchor any legal challenge. Opponents will argue that habitat loss is the primary driver of species decline and that removing habitat protections guts the ESA in practice even if the statute's text remains unchanged.
But the administration's position has its own legal footing. The 1995 Supreme Court case upholding the broad "harm" definition predates Loper Bright by nearly three decades. With Chevron deference now gone, the legal landscape has shifted. Courts reviewing the rescission will no longer defer to agency interpretations, they will have to decide for themselves what "harm" means under the ESA as Congress wrote it.
The resulting court battle could reshape environmental regulation for a generation. In the meantime, the administration has signaled it intends to keep moving. President Trump's broader vision of domestic energy dominance has driven a string of regulatory rollbacks, and the ESA change fits squarely within that pattern. The administration has also taken action on federal emissions cases as part of its wider effort to recalibrate the government's approach to energy and environmental enforcement.
Lost in the environmental groups' legal briefs are the people who lived under the old rule's weight. Timber workers in Oregon and Washington who lost jobs in the 1990s. Ranchers in Kansas and Oklahoma who couldn't expand operations because of a bird. Oilfield workers in the Permian Basin who watched projects stall over a lizard. Fishermen along the coast who navigated compliance regimes designed in Washington by people who never set foot on a boat.
These are not abstractions. The 2021 study's estimate of 16,000 to 32,000 lost timber jobs in the Pacific Northwest represents families, mortgages, school districts, and small towns hollowed out by a regulation that treated cutting a tree as the moral equivalent of shooting a protected animal.
The broader energy picture adds urgency. Major oil companies have at times resisted calls to ramp up production even when prices soared, making regulatory barriers to new development all the more costly for consumers who pay the price at the pump.
Administration officials insist the rescission does not open the door to reckless destruction. Direct killing or injuring of listed species remains illegal. What changes is that a farmer plowing a field, a logger cutting timber, or an energy company drilling a well can no longer be treated as a wildlife criminal because a regulator decided their activity might modify a habitat somewhere.
Several practical questions remain unanswered. The precise legal mechanism of the rescission, whether it is a final rule, an interim rule, or something else, is not yet clear from official announcements. Whether the change required or will require a notice-and-comment period under the Administrative Procedure Act could determine its durability in court. And the timing of Federal Register publication will set the clock on legal challenges.
The administration's diplomatic efforts on other fronts, including restored bilateral ties with Venezuela, suggest a White House comfortable operating on multiple policy tracks simultaneously. But the ESA fight may prove among the most consequential, and most contested.
Environmental litigation moves slowly. The people who lost their jobs and their land use rights under the old rule didn't have that luxury. If the courts ultimately side with the administration, the rescission will stand as a case study in what happens when regulators are finally told to read the law Congress actually wrote, not the one they wished it said.
