Long before COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other “experts” who “represent science,” and their senseless and baseless federal mandates and other authoritarian decrees, there was the Endangered Species Act. My home state of Wyoming, long after President Biden’s “patience [with non-vaxxers had] “w[orn] thin,” enjoyed the nation’s lowest “full vaccination rate” because we had been inoculated to junk science peddled by the federal government. After all, we lived through decades of “scientists” trying to control how we work and live because of the grizzly bear, the greater sage-grouse, and the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse.

Little wonder we greeted with enthusiasm President Trump’s plans, announced last month, to redefine the term “harm” as used in the ESA and last week’s executive order to require “Gold Standard Science in the conduct and management of [agencies’] scientific activities.” Trump’s order singled out the ESA as having failed to meet that standard and thereby lost the public’s trust — along with federal decision-making regarding COVID-19 and so-called climate change.

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Like everything else in government, the ESA began with good intentions but empty promises. Enacted in 1973 with only a handful of dissenting votes, everyone thought it a marvelous idea to save species like the bald eagle from extinction. Congress told us that as few as 100 species were likely to be named as threatened or endangered. Those that were listed were primarily in the third of the county owned by the federal government, most of which is in the American West and Alaska, and, in the unlikely event protected species were found on private lands, property owners would be compensated.

Today, as many as 1,678 are listed in the United States with hundreds more pending mostly due to petitions and lawsuits filed by well-heeled nongovernmental organizations. Not surprisingly, in what conservationist Robert Gordon calls a “bait and switch,” the ESA is used mainly to benefit “not the warm and fuzzies but the cold and slimies.” Furthermore, listed species, those requiring federal studies, land-use mandates and restrictions, and even all-out seizure of private property, occur nationwide regardless of who owns the land. Finally, the federal government rarely, if ever, willingly grants “just compensation” for the “taking” of “private property” for the ”public use” that is species protection.

The ESA went off the rails early. The ink was barely dry on the act when a law student and his professors used it to sue the Tennessee Valley Authority to stop the building of the Tellico Dam, under construction since 1967 and almost finished. After the U.S. Supreme Court hoisted Congress with its own petard by holding the ESA deemed snail darters more important than the dam — they must be protected “whatever the cost” — Congress exempted Tellico Dam from the act. Nevertheless, an early 2025 study concluded that the snail darter was neither a species nor endangered.

The snail darter fiasco foreshadowed decades of mischief by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, primarily, and the National Marine Fisheries Service. So controversial did the ESA, as implemented, become that Congress failed to reauthorize the act and it continues via annual appropriations. For example, in the 1990s, the ESA was used to end logging in the Pacific Northwest, killing thousands of jobs, dooming hundreds of small communities, and putting scores of counties on life support ostensibly to save the northern spotted owl. Nowadays, says the FWS, it is not logging that threatened the northern spotted owl, but 400,000 barred owls, which must be killed at a cost of $1.35 billion over 30 years. 

Experts like Gordon argue that the ESA does not “protect” species, but only “regulates” them, in the process of which agencies play fast and loose with terms such as “distinct population segment,” by which species that are in great abundance elsewhere are regulated in an area where few, perhaps naturally, occur, and “critical habitat” by which an area that contains neither species nor its habitat is placed off-limits to human activity. Moreover, as part of their regulatory processes, agencies make no distinction between species that are “endangered” and those that are merely “threatened.”

Given the misguided focus of the agencies implementing the ESA, after more than 50 years, it is a failure. In 2023, Gordon’s Western Caucus Foundation report found that, of the 62 species FWS claimed to be “recovered” and then delisted, 36 — almost 60% — were “data errors” and “should … set off alarm bells about … scientific integrity, or really lack thereof.” At this rate, Gordon notes, it will take 150 years for the FWS to clear the ESA list, assuming no new species are added.

Dr. Rob Roy Ramey, who courageously blew the whistle on the erroneous listing of the Preble’s jumping mouse that threatened to shut down the I-25 corridor from Colorado Springs, Colorado, north to Casper, Wyoming, believes the FWS fails as a scientific institution because of a conflict of interest. Its work is the product of “species cartels” afflicted with groupthink, confirmation bias, and a common desire to preserve the prestige, power, and appropriations of the FWS. 

For example, in one sage-grouse monograph, 41% of the authors were federal workers and the editor — a federal bureaucrat — authored one-third of the papers. Further, too often the peer-reviewed, published “science” the FWS uses to make decisions has neither data nor computer codes available to the public  Finally, when FWS data are available publicly but its results are not reproducible, the FWS and activist scientists argue the study was “peer reviewed” even though peer reviewers never saw the data.

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Since 1984, rulemaking by the FWS and NOAA Fisheries benefited mightily from the Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to agency expertise. Such deference occurred before the Supreme Court in an ESA case about the northern spotted owl and the red-cockaded woodpecker in which I filed a friend of the court brief in support of loggers and others. 

Over Justice Antonin Scalia’s vigorous dissent, the court concluded it owed deference to the FWS’s expansive definition of “harm.” With the recent demise of the Chevron doctrine, the Trump administration now seeks to restore both Scalia’s view of the ESA and the public’s confidence in the scientific integrity of the agencies that enforce the act.

William Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and Colorado-based, public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Trump.