The Trump administration has gone after the ESA repeatedly since January. The administration has argued that regulations are so strict that they stifle development and prevent the “energy domination” the president touts. In two executive orders this year, the president told agencies to rewrite ESA regulations in ways that could allow fossil fuel projects to move more quickly without some of the environmental reviews that are normally required.

While Burgum and other conservatives have claimed the law is broken, experts say it’s too rigid to work well for recovery. But scientists and legal experts say the law itself isn’t the problem. They say the ESA is undermined by a history of chronic underfunding, along with political whiplash as administrations change.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

A Record of Prevention, Not Just Recovery

The law’s critics often overlook the fact that the ESA has largely prevented mass extinctions. So far, only 26 of the more than 1,600 species on the federal list have gone extinct since 1973. In comparison, at least 47 species are estimated to have vanished while still waiting for a decision on their status.

“The ESA works more like a critical care unit than a hotel,” Wilcove said. “It’s as though we built a great hospital but never funded enough doctors or equipment.”

One of the law’s great success stories is the bald eagle. In the 1960s, a combination of habitat loss and the pesticide DDT had left only a few hundred nesting pairs of the iconic bird in the lower 48 states. But after DDT was banned and eagles got ESA protections in 1978, numbers gradually improved. By 2007, the bald eagle was the first species taken off the endangered list, with nearly 10,000 pairs across the country.

The law has also helped other animals such as American alligators and Steller sea lions.

Challenges on Private Lands

One of the law’s key protections is that it applies on both public and private land. That has long been a source of conflict because landowners chafe at restrictions. More than two-thirds of listed species live on private lands and about 10 percent live only on private lands.

“You can’t take these actions on your private land and, if you do, your ability to use that land is going to be limited and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have shown that these rules can create “perverse incentives.” One analysis of red-cockaded woodpeckers, for example, found that timber was more likely to be harvested early in the areas where the bird lived, likely to avert federal habitat rules.

Over the years, Congress has tried to offer incentives, such as tax breaks or conservation easements that compensate landowners for habitat protection. But such programs have been cut back in recent years.

The Future of the ESA

The Endangered Species Act once had bipartisan support but has since become one of the most litigated environmental laws in U.S. history. Various attempts to water it down have come from multiple administrations, but so far, when one party takes over from another, most of the regulations get switched back.

What worries today’s conservationists is that the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of protections may be combined with a conservative Supreme Court, creating a larger permanent change to the ESA’s reach. Climate change and habitat loss are also speeding up the number of species teetering toward a crisis.

Andrew Mergen, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School and former deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, spent decades litigating ESA cases before retiring last year. He sees less need for changes to the ESA itself. “The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

A Glimpse of Hope

Amid the policy battles, some recent news has been a reminder of what can be achieved. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish native to the Ohio and Roanoke rivers, had recovered enough to be delisted. Burgum pointed to that as “proof” that the ESA is no longer like “Hotel California.”

But conservationists say the recovery was the result of more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration and expensive reintroduction efforts that had been launched long before Trump took office.

“The optimistic part,” Wilcove said, “is that we know how to save species when we invest in them. The question is whether we’ll make that commitment.”