Trump Tries to Gut Endangered Species Act

Due to a recent memorandum, Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) staff can no longer advise builders they need to obtain a permit mandated by law to maintain endangered species habitat. This means that the applicant can choose whether or not to request an incidental take permit (ITP) under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. As of now, when a species is listed as threatened, they receive a series of automatic protections. With this new rule, those protections are only given on a case by case basis. Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, released the following statement:

“This outrageous new rule is dangerous and irresponsible; it reverses the entire purpose of the Endangered Species Act. Trump and Pruitt have been dismantling environmental and wildlife protections bit by bit and this one is a huge hit. We could see developers and fossil fuel companies paving over threatened and endangered species habitat, essentially wiping out populations. This is a nothing but a muzzle on the agency whose job it is to protect wildlife and conserve their habitat. If you can’t mention a species, you can’t protect it. The purpose of this rule is to gut the ESA altogether.

“The new rule is basically like ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ when it comes to endangered species, creating open season for the wildlife that need protections the most. Before applying for permits, companies must complete studies of threatened and endangered species. With this new rule, they won’t be told about the species and therefore won’t have to do the studies before applying. Then they must look at the potential impacts identified in those studies. Without these studies and the FWS’s comments, many more proposals will be built, essentially bulldozing important habitat.

“This is especially critical for New Jersey because state laws protecting these species are weaker. We rely on the federal protections in fighting many proposals. We’re fighting pipelines that want to destroy habitat for threatened and endangered species like the Dwarf Wedge mussel in the case of PennEast Pipeline, or the rare bog turtle. We use the ESA as an important tool to protect these wild places and prevent fossil fuel infrastructure and other developments including dams, roads, and more from destroying our environment.

“This is just another shameful giveaway to developers and special interests over the environment and ecology of the United States. One of the FWS’s major functions is to comment on governmental permits and impacts on these species. This new rule will prevent the FWS from enforcing the ESA and looking at it under NEPA reviews or permitting. We protect endangered species to protect important habitat that has high-quality waterways and biodiversity.

“Richard Nixon signed the ESA in the middle of Watergate because it was such an important piece of legislation. This not only sets a bad precedent for hushing federal agencies, but is a dangerous and deliberant attempt to roll back protections under the law for these species. We will take the Trump Administration to court if we have to to overturn this dangerous rule that affects every kind of governmental approval from FERC to ACOE to mining and logging companies. We need to fight back against this rule that violates the whole purpose of the ESA.”