This year’s Western monarch butterfly winter count may be the second- or third-lowest ever. Until recently, a proposed Endangered Species Act listing seemed like a safe bet. Now, even if that happens, the Trump administration has proposed a packet of revisions that critics say will gut the law—and put local species at risk.
U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement that the Trump administration is merely restoring the ESA to its “original intent” and ending “years of legal confusion and regulatory overreach.” Of the five new ESA rules so far, four are essentially repeats from the first Trump administration that were in effect for a few months before the Biden administration mostly did away with them.
This time around, the rules could be real game-changers. “We’re in the middle of a biodiversity meltdown, and these changes will destroy one of the most effective tools we had,” says Stu Weiss, chief scientist at the environmental consultancy Creekside Science, monarch expert, and winner of a Bay Nature Local Hero Award in 2023.
Karrigan Börk, a professor of law and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at U.C. Davis, calls the new rules a “wholesale attack” on the ESA, compounded by the administration’s attempts to weaken other bedrock environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act; its massive staff cuts at the Fish and Wildlife Service, Environmental Protection Agency, and other agencies; and its near-abandonment of environmental enforcement. “There’s an effort to overwhelm the environmental community,” Börk says.
Pre-ESA, Bay Area plants and animals regularly went extinct: think of the California grizzly bear, Berkeley kangaroo rat, Xerces blue butterfly, sooty crayfish, or Palo Alto lost thistle. The roughly 100 Bay Area species listed since the law’s passage in 1973 have all avoided extinction—though few have made it off the list.
California’s rare species do have safeguards: the state Endangered Species Act covers many of the same species listed under the federal law, and applies even on federal lands, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. For federally listed species not on California’s list—including candidate species such as the monarch—a new state law approved in October promises them state protections if the CDFW determines their federal protections have been narrowed or eliminated.
But CESA can’t replace a hollowed-out ESA, should the changes be finalized and survive expected legal challenges. The “concern is real for some species in the Bay Area,” says wildlife biologist Jeff A. Alvarez. Here’s how Trump’s administration is rolling back the ESA—and which local species might suffer the fallout.
Rule change #1: Money matters
The Endangered Species Act states that listing decisions should be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available.” From the beginning, the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service—the two federal listing agencies—interpreted this to mean “without reference to possible economic or other impacts.” But, as it did in 2019, the Trump administration wants to erase this phrase from the regulatory record, meaning struggling species could be denied ESA protections so as not to impede, say, lucrative golf courses or hotel developments.
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This change hits those Bay Area species that have been proposed for listing under the ESA but don’t yet have final protections, such as the California spotted owl, Northwestern pond turtle, monarch, Clear Lake hitch (a large minnow), and sunflower sea star. “If all of a sudden [the listing agencies] have to do an economic analysis, maybe that changes their mind,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a national conservation nonprofit. At the very least, he says, it could delay an already painfully slow process—the California spotted owl’s review is two years behind schedule. Just last month, the administration missed a deadline to decide on final ESA protections for the monarch. Some experts doubt the butterfly will get listed under Trump. After all, few species ever have with him in charge.
For species that do get listed, money will play a larger role in designating critical habitat. Economic factors have always mattered for critical habitat: Alvarez points out, for example, that in 2006 the red-legged frog’s critical habitat was cut by around 90 percent, primarily because of the alleged burden it placed on homeowners and ranchers. But the Trump rules call for financial and national security considerations to be given even more weight. Under this interpretation, a developer could say, “’It’s going to cost me $500 million for you to designate critical habitat there,’ ” Greenwald says, and the listing agencies would “have to accept that at face value.” “It would take away their discretion, essentially.” The Trump administration is simultaneously limiting its own wildlife experts from consulting on projects where listed species live.
For monarchs and minnows alike, the California ESA would offer little relief here. The state law doesn’t designate critical habitat, nor does it have a consultation requirement.
Rule change #2: The phenomenon that shall not be named
The Trump administration doesn’t like using the words “climate change,” except to call it a “hoax” or “con job.” True to form, the new ESA rules make no mention of it. But the administration’s interpretation of the phrase “foreseeable future,” along with when it’s deemed “not prudent” to designate critical habitat, seem clearly aimed at hijacking the ESA’s ability to help species under threat from climate change, says Kristen Boyles, managing attorney at Earthjustice’s Northwest regional office.
The first Trump administration already declined to designate any critical habitat for the Sierra Nevada red fox, whose tiny surviving populations near Yosemite and Lassen Peak depend on snowy terrain that will move higher with climate change.
In the future, the feds might likewise shrug as climate change overwhelms kelp forests (home to imperiled sunflower sea stars), sandy beaches (snowy plovers), and San Francisco Bay marshlands (Ridgway’s rails). “If the only thing that’s protected is tidal marsh now, then the Ridgway’s rail is in real trouble once we get more sea-level rise,” says Sam Veloz, Point Blue’s ecoinformatics and climate solutions director. “Part of what we’re counting on is the ability of that habitat to migrate upwards in elevation.”
Rule change #3: Home on the (historical) range?
In another repeat from 2019, the Trump administration is raising the bar for designating critical habitat in areas no longer occupied by the species in question. As Boyles points out, though, “If you don’t look at the historical habitat there’s very little chance you’ll get to recovery. You’ll just have small, isolated populations hanging on by their claws.”
What’s more, some of these allegedly unoccupied areas might not be so unoccupied after all. The Alameda whipsnake, Ridgway’s rail, and many other listed species are masters at eluding humans. The salt marsh harvest mouse is easily confused with close relatives. Alvarez notes that the foothill yellow-legged frog—four populations of which were federally listed in 2023—was surveyed by day for decades before researchers realized it was easier to find at night.
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Luckily, most federally listed species already have critical habitat, including the foothill yellow-legged frog, which got its designation in the very last week of the Biden administration. In the future, however, newly listed species, and cryptic species in particular, might be out of luck. “Habitat can be erased very quickly,” says wildlife biologist Amanda Colombo Murphy. “It is so important that time and care be taken before resources are permanently destroyed.” The state ESA, while helpful, offers fewer prohibitions than the federal ESA against habitat modification.
Rule change #4: Off with the blanket for threatened species
TThe ESA offers two levels of protection: threatened and endangered. Historically, newly listed threatened species automatically received the same safety net as endangered species. After all, any listing suggests “an urgent situation,” Alvarez says. Now, however, the Trump administration is trying to remove this “blanket rule” in favor of species-specific plans. For species proposed as threatened, such as the Northwestern pond turtle, monarch, and sunflower sea star, this means they could have few or no protections while time-consuming species-specific plans get worked out.
For species already listed as threatened, the Trump administration says “removing the ‘blanket rule’ option would result in no immediate changes.” But Börk suspects, based on the proposal’s wording, that the administration aims to write new, less protective species-specific plans for all threatened species, such as the Delta smelt. “It didn’t really matter for a long time if you were threatened or endangered,” Börk says. “But now it does.”
Rule change #5: What counts as harm?
The coup de grâce of the ESA changes is a brand new move to rescind the legal concept of “harm.” This rule would seemingly limit the ESA so that it only prohibits the direct killing or injuring of wildlife, but not habitat destruction—a huge change from how the ESA has always been interpreted. Habitat destruction, of course, is the reason most species become endangered in the first place.
Boyles calls the proposal a “brazen” attempt to sever a “commonsense and biological truth”—that harming habitat equates to harming species. It stands to impact virtually every listed species in the Bay Area and the country. Damming coho salmon streams, logging old-growth redwoods where marbled murrelets nest, paving over vernal pools used by California tiger salamanders, increasing vessel traffic in blue-whale zones, building luxury resorts at Myrtle’s silverspot butterfly hotspots—all might be considered permissible in certain instances. Here, the state ESA cushions the blow. But Boyles worries that on federal lands the federal ESA usually preempts state law. CESA won’t apply, for example, when in conflict with U.S. legislation telling agencies how to, say, manage logging and mining in national forests.
Removing “harm” would reverberate in ways big and small. Weiss worries it will eliminate the leverage necessary to push through habitat conservation and natural community conservation plans that have been successful at protecting imperiled butterflies, plants, and amphibians in multiple Bay Area counties. Börk, on the other hand, anticipates hundreds of conflicting court decisions that could frustrate not just environmentalists, but developers looking for permits. (Experts anticipate drawn-out lawsuits for the other rules, too, some of which could make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.)
“This isn’t just about plants and animals, it’s about us too,” Greenwald says. “To have this administration that’s taking us in exactly the wrong direction, it’s really disheartening.” Even if Trump doesn’t care about monarchs and other rare species, plenty of other humans do. Each of the new rules received more than 300,000 public comments.
