Wildlife, ecosystems, and our tools to defend them are in trouble. Fueled by climate change, habitat destruction, and other factors, the United States is losing biodiversity at alarming rates. The landmark Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA)—like other environmental laws of that era—is hamstrung by inefficiencies, underinvestment, and tenuous political support. Meanwhile, an urgent need to build affordable, clean energy and housing in our country presents real challenges for nature conservation and outdated permitting systems. Making matters worse, the current presidential administration and Congress are exploiting this dynamic to take aim at core protections for wildlife, public lands, and clean water.
This moment of intersecting crises calls for big ideas and for embracing new opportunities. Conservation allies have successfully defended bedrock environmental laws for decades, but today we are losing too much ground, literally and figuratively, to simply defend the status quo. Supporters of America’s lands, waters, and wildlife—including conservationists, state and Tribal leaders, landowners, hunters and anglers, and other experts—need to offer a clear alternative vision. America needs a plan to revamp species conservation that achieves more for wildlife and ecosystems while enabling us to build the critical infrastructure necessary to tackle climate change and affordability. Getting more from the ESA is a key part of that work.
To be clear: The ESA is not a primary driver of America’s inability to build the things we need. But a system that adds unnecessary costs and delays to some projects while still falling short for wildlife serves nobody well. And with both sides of the political aisle calling for reforms to help America build with urgency, conservation supporters need to show that abundant nature, energy, and housing can—and must—go hand-in-hand.
America needs a plan to revamp species conservation that achieves more for wildlife and ecosystems while enabling us to build the critical infrastructure necessary to tackle climate change and affordability.
Realistically, given Washington’s current political climate, common sense and constructive changes to U.S. wildlife policy will not be immediately feasible. But political dynamics will invariably shift again, and when they do, America’s next leaders will need practical and serious solutions to the wildlife challenges we face. Below, we offer ideas to start the conversation, but more work will be needed to craft a shared agenda that meets this critical moment.
Where We Find Ourselves
While the ESA has had major successes and meaningful gains since it was passed more than 50 years ago, conservation progress has not kept pace with mounting threats to biodiversity. NatureServe estimates that over one-third of all U.S. animal and plant species are at risk of extinction, with 41% of ecosystems facing potential range-wide collapse. Land use changes, including habitat destruction and fragmentation, are one of the major drivers of U.S. and global biodiversity loss, and the Center for American Progress (CAP) found in 2019 that the United States is losing the equivalent of a football field’s worth of natural area every 30 seconds.
Meanwhile, the enormous and rapid pressures of climate change on the natural world—not fully contemplated by the ESA’s authors in the early 1970s—are pushing nature over a cliff, with climate impacts affecting more than 90% of ESA-listed species and supercharging other threats like habitat loss and invasive species. As a result, the future paths of wildlife conservation and climate action will be deeply interconnected.
Even before the current presidential administration began to cut wildlife agency resources and weaken wildlife protection policies, progress under the ESA was falling short. ESA’s protections have prevented numerous species from vanishing entirely, and the rebounded populations of bald eagles and green sea turtles stand today as testaments to its successes. But a growing number of species are in serious danger, with many facing long or uncertain roads to recovery.
Merely rebuilding government to do things the way we did them before won’t cut it: The status quo was already falling short for wildlife, and we will have still more to contend with in the years ahead.
While the ESA’s requirements help limit harms to imperiled species, projects are rarely required to fully offset their impacts. Additionally, incentives to encourage habitat improvement on private land remain inadequate to reverse the tide of habitat loss; and fear that a species’ presence will bring new and costly restrictions can discourage landowners from pursuing restoration activities needed for wildlife to thrive. Combined with massive shortfalls in public recovery funding, the results are steady declines for too many imperiled species and ecosystems.
What’s more, despite some notable efforts to innovate, underfunding and decades of accumulated procedures—along with bureaucratic inertia—have resulted in an inefficient and overloaded system for ESA implementation.¹ Reports vary and critics frequently overstate the impacts of ESA-related delays, but lengthy permitting and agency consultations, particularly for larger projects, can add avoidable costs to critical infrastructure projects. One study found that 20% of formal ESA consultations with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) exceed their 135-day deadline, while the National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries) reportedly misses these deadlines more frequently. Data is even more limited on permits issued for non-federal actions, but anecdotal evidence points to lengthy delays—even to permit scientific research—and critics point to extreme examples of ESA permit delays stretching for many years. While the vast majority of interagency ESA consultations proceed smoothly and reasons for delays vary, we should expect that a dramatic scale-up of clean energy and other infrastructure would substantially increase the number of large, complicated consultations, straining the system’s limits.
Delays and underperformance should come as no surprise, given that funding for FWS’ environmental review staff fell 20% between 2003 and 2023, while, at the same time, the number of endangered and threatened species grew by 39%. By some estimates, the FWS receives less than half of the funding needed to successfully implement the ESA’s mandates. In addition to permitting slowdowns, chronic underfunding has resulted in delayed and outdated wildlife recovery plans, along with inadequate resources to support recovery.
Moving in the Wrong Direction
The Trump administration’s actions are making these problems worse. In line with other moves that dismantle and undermine science-based decision making across government, a series of regulatory changes would severely handicap the ESA. Most notably, the administration issued a proposed rule last year declaring that destroying habitat does not constitute “harm” to species, abandoning a pillar of the ESA that has been in place for 50 years. Other steps by the administration include eroding the use of compensatory mitigation, a core tool used by wildlife agencies and developers to offset unavoidable impacts to wildlife by supporting habitat restoration or conservation.
At the same time, the current administration has fired FWS staff and other agency experts needed to process permits and conserve wildlife. The administration is also undermining habitat conservation and restoration on public lands, and it proposed deep budget cuts to already starved wildlife agencies. The president’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposes cutting both the FWS and NOAA Fisheries budgets by more than one-third and it zeroes out appropriated grant funding to states, Tribes, and territories for endangered and at-risk wildlife. While Congress has so far ignored the deepest proposed cuts, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act clawed back tens of millions of dollars from FWS that had been dedicated to ESA recovery work.
The predictable result of these recent and ongoing attacks will be a broken system that fails wildlife, developers, and communities alike, making it harder to build needed infrastructure while pushing species closer to extinction.
Looking Ahead
America’s next presidential administration will inherit a planet in crisis, with the urgencies of climate change and biodiversity loss more intertwined than ever. Rapidly scaling up clean energy and getting this massive infrastructure buildout right will be critical for saving wildlife and stabilizing ecosystems. Merely rebuilding government to do things the way we did them before won’t cut it: The status quo was already falling short for wildlife, and we will have still more to contend with in the years ahead.
Rapidly building large amounts of clean and affordable energy, housing, and other infrastructure will inevitably present complicated challenges and trade-offs, strain America’s permitting systems, and make existing weaknesses much more acute. To put the challenge in perspective, Department of Energy (DOE) modeling from 2024 projected that meeting a 100% decarbonization target by 2035 would require more than quadrupling total utility-scale wind and solar capacity in the United States.² A 2023 DOE study projected the need to more than double regional transmission deployment (and more than quadruple interregional transfer capacity) by 2035 in a scenario with high renewable energy deployment and high load growth. Meanwhile, the United States needs to dramatically ramp up construction of new homes, with the nation currently facing an estimated housing deficit of up to 2 million homes.
A politics of “abundance” doesn’t need to equate to anti-environmental results.
A recently galvanized movement among Democratic and Republican officials and thought leaders calls for urgently stripping away barriers that have hobbled America’s ability to build more of the things we need, including targeting outdated zoning restrictions and environmental requirements. Some politicians and big industry players are already exploiting this momentum to push damaging attacks on NEPA, ESA, the Clean Water Act, and comparable state laws. In the case of the ESA, critics are also tapping into long-simmering discontent among some landowners and property rights groups.
But a politics of “abundance” doesn’t need to equate to anti-environmental results. The American people still believe in America the Beautiful and expect abundant clean water, wildlife, and access to nature along with abundant housing, energy, and transportation options.
Now is the time for conservation supporters to come together and forge concrete policy innovations that can deliver this more holistic vision. Under the ESA, America has stabilized populations on the brink of collapse, prevented the extinction of 99% of listed species, and helped dozens of species fully recover. In 50 years, we have learned a lot about what works and what could work better. Drawing on these lessons, we have a chance to meet a historic moment, reverse the trendlines of nature loss, and substantially dial up recovery progress.
Opportunities to Achieve More
We believe there are meaningful opportunities for policy reforms that a conservation-minded administration or Congress—supported by voices across the political spectrum—should embrace to meet today’s needs and urgent threats. Further conversations will be needed among wildlife experts, state and Tribal officials, academics, project developers, and other practitioners to map out the best policy innovations, but some ideas stand out as early starting points for discussion.
Thinking Bigger
New reforms and investments could help shift the emphasis of endangered species conservation from narrow, project-by-project decisions towards landscape-scale progress that delivers more for wildlife and communities alike. Focusing on the bigger picture could help address the “death by a thousand cuts” facing imperiled species—especially from federal action—where ESA requirements reduce damage from individual projects but wildlife populations ultimately decline over the long term.
Achieving that goal requires consistent, easy-to-access, and smarter application of compensatory mitigation to offset unavoidable species impacts through additional conservation and restoration. This includes setting clear and durable no-net-loss standards (or preferably net-gain standards), while preferencing and actively supporting “advance mitigation,” which is early investment in pre-identified, high-priority conservation projects. Those proactive projects can deliver more for target species, bolster larger ecosystem health, and even offer expanded job opportunities. To enable large, early investments, Congress should establish a revolving loan fund for these wildlife conservation or restoration projects that is replenished by infrastructure developers.
To get more from mitigation investments, FWS and NOAA Fisheries should also prioritize earlier assessment and identification of the most critical needs for habitat conservation and restoration, with an emphasis on landscape-level investments with multiple benefits. Other opportunities include improving or expanding landscape-scale planning through marine spatial planning, regional mitigation plans (building on lessons from California and the Bureau of Land Management’s Western Solar Plan), and prioritizing robust multi-species habitat conservation plans for non-federal activities.
A renewed focus on conserving large landscapes—through mitigation investments or conservation measures outside of the ESA—will also help achieve more than a species-by-species, project-by-project, approach alone. Large areas of intact, connected lands and marine waters do more for wildlife than isolated parcels. In fact, research shows that large marine and land protected areas provide important “spillover” benefits for wildlife populations well beyond their protected boundaries. Large landscape conservation is particularly important to enable wildlife species to adapt to a changing climate.
Better, Faster Outcomes
A renewed focus on delivering bigger gains for wildlife should also be accompanied by a dedicated push to make ESA processes work better and faster, with an eye to the clean energy and other projects America needs to bring online. Implemented by well-staffed agencies and combined with other improvements to facilitate efficient permitting, such reforms could make a meaningful difference for infrastructure deployment, reduce political risk to fundamental ESA legal protections, and ultimately result in stronger conservation outcomes. Critically, well-designed reforms should save money and time through process improvements and pre-planning, not by watering down conservation requirements.
Focus areas could include:
- Standardizing requirements to avoid, minimize, and offset impacts from categories of infrastructure projects—or project components—to skip redundant review steps, give more certainty to developers, and focus on the most tangible risks and benefits for imperiled species in particular regions.
- Expediting reviews for projects in pre-identified low conflict zones or projects with clear net benefits for species.
- Assembling a strike team of agency experts to address high-priority projects that pose greater complications for ESA compliance that would coordinate among agencies, overcome process delays, and ensure better outcomes.
- Revamping and reinvesting in technology solutions at FWS, NOAA, and other agencies to expedite permitting steps for federal and non-federal actions. These can build on progress and lessons learned from Inflation Reduction Act spending for permitting improvements at NOAA and across government, while tapping into AI and other new innovations.
Combined with early planning and mitigation, process improvements like these could help the government plan for and expedite high-priority infrastructure—like renewable energy—to reduce conflicts, cut project timelines and costs, and better conserve at-risk species and habitat. For example, the federal government and states could pre-plan for renewable energy projects or transmission corridors, facilitate development in low-conflict zones, develop a simplified and dependable playbook for developers to meet requirements to avoid and minimize relevant species impacts, troubleshoot high-priority complicated projects, and pre-invest in mitigation to proactively conserve habitat ahead of any infrastructure construction.
The American people still believe in America the Beautiful and expect abundant clean water, wildlife, and access to nature along with abundant housing, energy, and transportation options.
Aligning Incentives for Conservation and Collaboration
Other reforms could include new or enhanced rewards for private landowners taking voluntary conservation actions, ultimately giving them a greater stake in the success of species, defusing political strain on the ESA, and delivering better conservation results. That might involve new or enhanced regulatory flexibility or assurances, as well as facilitating or streamlining access to existing programs for landowners and expediting approval processes. As one example, where appropriate, agencies could explore offering relaxed regulatory restrictions as a species reaches established milestones on the pathway to recovery. Other enhanced incentives could include government payments, habitat leasing, tax benefits, or conservation bank revenue.
FWS or NOAA Fisheries should also give other federal agencies more flexibility around individual project approvals if they can demonstrate overall improvements to the relevant species. For conservation to succeed, agencies like the Bureau of Land Management or Department of Defense—which manage substantial amounts of lands and/or substantial budgets—will need to focus on the mission of helping imperiled species thrive rather than simply checking boxes.
Investing in Successful Implementation and Collaboration
Beyond improvements to ESA policies and practices, successfully reversing wildlife and biodiversity loss in America will clearly require expanded, and well-targeted, public investments. As many experts have pointed out, the ESA serves as an “emergency room” for imperiled species—an underfunded and underperforming one, at that—and more work is needed to keep species from becoming listed and to support them once they’re delisted.
In that vein, CAP has proposed adding a new “at-risk” designation category under the ESA. This designation would not add regulatory requirements but could help to focus and catalyze early, voluntary collaboration and investment by federal, state, and Tribal governments in order to support the most vulnerable species before the stakes and costs of recovery get higher. The successful collaboration initiated to conserve the greater sage-grouse—despite some unfortunate political whiplash—could serve as a model for other early action policies that help keep wildlife species out of the emergency room.
Congress will also need to scale up complementary funding for wildlife and habitat conservation to save resources in the long term, keep species from being listed, and align incentives for landowners, states, Tribes, and other key partners. As one example, passing the bipartisan Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would bring up to $1.4 billion to the table annually for core wildlife conservation and restoration efforts by states, territories, and Tribes.
Finally, attempts to reform ESA requirements and processes will fail without sufficient funding for FWS, NOAA, and partner agencies. As we noted above, agency funding for ESA implementation has historically lagged behind what the agencies need, and the current administration is digging an even bigger hole. A new administration and Congress will need to quickly prioritize targeted resources to rebuild the staff and systems gutted by the Trump administration, including new technology resources, and fund the agencies at a level commensurate with the challenges at hand.
At the same time, since available resources will inevitably fall short of optimal levels, FWS and NOAA will need to aggressively pursue process efficiencies that achieve more with less. This should include re-examining how funding is allocated among species for recovery actions, while also identifying ways to spend less on recovery planning and more on recovery actions with known benefits.
Conclusion
Even as conservation and environmental allies are forced into daily fights defending America’s wildlife, public lands, clean water, and clean air against dangerous attacks, it’s vital that national, state, Tribal and local leaders create space to build an alternative path forward—one that offers more than just a return to 2024. Today’s unprecedented challenges require new policy solutions that face the nature, climate, and affordability crises head-on, rejecting the false choices that will otherwise fill the void.
And because we know the old status quo isn’t up to the task, we need a plan to rebuild a government that aims higher. We need wildlife agencies focused on a re-imagined mission of restoring abundant nature, not stuck grinding away on endless project paperwork, losing ground year-over-year.
We need wildlife agencies focused on a re-imagined mission of restoring abundant nature, not stuck grinding away on endless project paperwork, losing ground year-over-year.
America’s leaders came together more than 50 years ago to craft the Endangered Species Act and its contemporary environmental laws in an exercise of pragmatic hope as our country awakened to a suite of environmental catastrophes. Conditions and challenges have changed—and we must adapt our tools too—but that blend of hope and pragmatism is needed today more than ever before.
¹ Note: ESA consultation and permitting can be intertwined with Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and other federal requirements, adding layers of complications for project reviews.
² Based on National Renewable Energy Laboratory 2024 Standard Scenarios modeling of 100% lifecycle CO2-equivalent electric-sector decarbonization by 2035 compared to Energy Information Administration data for 2024. Projected increases in utility-scale solar and wind capacity by 2035 under these scenarios range from 4.5- to 6.2-fold increases (across low to high electricity demand growth scenarios).
