The Trump Administration Defangs the Endangered Species Act

The Daily

The episode examines the Trump administration's recent efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act by altering the legal definition of 'take.'

Key takeaways

• A recent memo suggests that hitting a whale inadvertently would no longer be considered an illegal 'take' under the law.
• The Trump administration is moving to remove regulatory language that defined habitat modification as a form of harm.

Main topics

• Endangered Species Act
• Environmental Regulation

Notable quotes

A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it because the vessel's course was not set against the whale.

Conclusion

The episode underscores the significant legal and ecological stakes in

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) I'm Winna Liu. I write the game Speaker 1 (0:02) Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games. And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. Speaker 4 (0:08) I'm Sam Mazursky, and I create the game Spelling Bee and Letterboxd on a daily basis. And I have this thing called chromesthesia. I see color when I'm listening to music. Speaker 6 (0:19) New York Times games are made by people, like Speaker 4 (0:22) the ones you just heard from. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games at nytimes.com slash join games. Speaker 7 (0:31) From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Speaker 7 (0:41) In its second term, the Trump administration has escalated its efforts to roll back environmental regulations. The Speaker 5 (0:48) Trump administration is moving to open up a large chunk of Alaskan wilderness to oil and gas drilling. Speaker 4 (0:52) With Speaker 7 (0:53) a stroke of a pen, President Donald Trump has cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments down to a tenth of their Speaker 4 (0:59) size. The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to repeal a rule protecting millions of acres of roadless forest. Speaker 7 (1:07) Many of these actions were expected by conservationists. But last week stood apart as it became clear that one of America's bedrock environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act, appeared to be losing some of its most important protections. So today, I speak with my colleague Katrin Einhorn about what is changing and what impact it could have on the country's most vulnerable animals and ecosystems. It's Monday, September 21st. Speaker 7 (1:37) Katrin Einhorn, welcome to The Daily. Thank you so much. Katrin, I think that at this point, everybody has this sort of general sense that the Trump administration has been rolling back a lot of different environmental protections as part of this sort of broader push to deregulate. You have been covering, though, this huge escalation against what I think is probably one of the most iconic protections in the country, which is the Endangered Species Act. Just remind us briefly what that is. Speaker 6 (2:03) Yeah. I mean, it's a really landmark law. It's half a century. old now, and it protects in the U.S. more than 1,600 animals and plants that are threatened with extinction. You know, it lists them as either threatened or endangered. And, you know, the law does a lot of things. One longstanding rule is that you have to take steps to avoid accidentally destroying a species living in a place. No matter who you are, if you're a person building a house or a company, logging a forest. Speaker 1 (2:34) And Speaker 6 (2:35) the Trump administration has been taking measures to weaken the law in all kinds of ways. It's part of his deregulatory agenda, which he's really proud of and talks about a lot. They did some of that work in his first term. And now during the second term, the administration has been more aggressively trying to strip protections in the act. In this past week, we got access to a memo. outlining intentions to go even further. Speaker 7 (3:01) It Speaker 6 (3:02) shows that they're trying to strip a really core aspect of this law where they're arguably telling people, you won't get in trouble for killing endangered species so long as you didn't mean to target them, which is an enormous change in the protections that endangered species have had in this country. Speaker 7 (3:20) Before we get into the specifics of how that is happening, I want to hear a little bit of the history of the Endangered Species Act. Like, what does it actually say and what were its goals initially? Speaker 6 (3:30) I think it helps to go even a little bit further back to like the late 1800s and the early 1900s. A lot of very prominent species had been hunted to near extinction. Bison is really the iconic example. Passenger pigeons had actually been hunted to extinction. They are extinct. They used to be so abundant that they would like darken the skies. Speaker 7 (3:49) Wow. Speaker 6 (3:50) Wolves, beavers, even white-tailed deer. Their populations had collapsed because of overhunting. And so at first, conservation in the U.S. was really... just about recovering species, managing hunting and fishing for more sustainable populations. And then over time, scientists and other conservationists really came to understand the importance of habitat and ecosystems on which species depend. And this ultimately leads to a more holistic conversation about what kind of protections animals needed. Speaker 7 (4:21) Okay, so this conversation starts, what happens next? Speaker 6 (4:24) Well, we're in... like the early 1970s, right? And the environmental movement has gained huge traction. Speaker 3 (4:34) I don't think there's any other issue viewed in its broadest sense, which is as critical to mankind as the issue of the quality of the environment in which we live. Let's remember what Speaker 6 (4:47) was happening. Like the pesticide DDT was devastating bird populations. Speaker 4 (4:51) Now the oil gushes forth out of control. There is no way to stop it. In Speaker 6 (4:57) 1969, there's this record-breaking oil spill off the coast of California. Speaker 4 (5:02) The Cuyahoga River in Ohio is so loaded with the waste products of petroleum distillation that it is actually in danger of catching fire. The Speaker 6 (5:10) Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catches on fire. We Speaker 4 (5:13) must act and act decisively. It is literally now or never. Speaker 6 (5:18) In 1970, the EPA is established. It goes on to ban DDT. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act pass right shortly after. Speaker 4 (5:27) These problems will not stand still for politics. or for partisanship. The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. Speaker 6 (5:38) And during this time, President Nixon, of course a Republican, says that measures in place to conserve species are not adequate. And he calls on Congress to pass a more comprehensive law. And they do it almost unanimously, and it's called the Endangered Species Act. Speaker 7 (5:59) And how did it actually work? Like, what did it say specifically about how to protect animals or endangered species? Speaker 6 (6:04) There are a lot of provisions in the law, but, like, one really important thing that I think we can wrap our head around and that is important for this conversation is that it says that you can't take an endangered animal. And it notes that the term take means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect. or to attempt to engage in any such conduct. Speaker 7 (6:28) Okay, so lots of words that basically mean do not hurt an animal that is endangered or at risk of being endangered. Speaker