For half a century, the Endangered Species Act did something simple. It didn't just say you can't shoot a bald eagle. It said you can't bulldoze the tree the eagle nests in.

That second part is gone now.

On July 10, 2026, the Trump administration announced it had finalized a rule that erases the longstanding definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act. The rule was published in the Federal Register on July 14 and takes effect in mid-September. It means the government will no longer treat the destruction of an endangered animal's habitat as breaking the law.

What actually changed

For decades, "harm" to an endangered species included wrecking the places it needs to survive — cutting down old-growth forests where owls nest, or draining the streams where salmon spawn. The federal government scrutinized logging, mining, and water projects to make sure they didn't wipe out the last homes of vanishing wildlife.

Under the new rule, only actions that directly injure or kill an animal count as "harm." Destroying its habitat no longer does — as long as the animal isn't physically standing there when you do it.

A law professor put it bluntly. "You can destroy the resources a species requires as long as you don't do it when the species is at home," said Karrigan Börk, who directs the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. "If you drain a salmon river during the summer when the salmon aren't in it, ultimately it has the same impact of killing off that whole species."

The practical result: many forests, wetlands, deserts, and other critical habitats are now open to development, logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. A lot of that land is federal public land that belongs to all of us.

Why habitat is the whole ballgame

This isn't a small technical tweak. Habitat loss is the reason most species end up endangered in the first place.

A 2019 study in the journal Conservation Science and Practice looked at every species added to the endangered list from 1975 to 2017. Only 17% were threatened by direct killing. 81% were threatened by habitat loss. In other words, the rule the administration just deleted covered the danger that actually drives species to extinction.

Chris Servheen spent 35 years as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's grizzly bear recovery coordinator. His verdict, to Montana Free Press: "We wouldn't have grizzly bears today if we didn't have the harm definition for habitat."

Conservation groups called it what it is. "It's common sense that we can't save a species unless we save the places that they live," said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. "This is an attempted death blow to the Endangered Species Act."

There's also a legal irony here. Back in 1995, the Supreme Court looked at this exact question and sided with habitat protection. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home, a 6-3 majority upheld the government's definition of "harm" as including habitat destruction that kills or injures wildlife. The administration is now throwing out a reading of the law that the highest court in the country blessed 30 years ago.

The "let the states handle it" excuse

The administration is selling this as freedom. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the change "restores common sense, respects private property...and follows the statute Congress actually passed." Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick framed it as lifting "overly broad and burdensome regulations that have restrained our fishermen for too long." The message: don't worry, states can protect habitat if they want to.

The people who actually run state wildlife programs say that's not true.

When the rule was first proposed, wildlife agency leaders from both red and blue states warned it would gut their conservation work. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, New Jersey, Vermont, North Dakota, and Wyoming all raised concerns, along with the national association that represents state wildlife managers. Of all the state wildlife agencies whose comments Stateline reviewed, only Alaska's fully backed the change.

Here's why the states can't simply pick up the slack:

• State laws weren't built for this. Most state endangered species laws only stop poaching and the direct killing of animals. Protecting nesting trees and spawning streams has been the federal government's job since the 1970s.
• Almost no state requires habitat protection. A 2024 analysis by the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators found only eight states plus Puerto Rico even require critical-habitat designations. California is essentially the only state with a real system to make developers offset the habitat they destroy.
• State agencies are broke. State wildlife programs are already underfunded. Taking over a massive federal regulatory system overnight is not something they have the staff or money to do.
• States can't touch federal land anyway. Across the West, huge areas of critical habitat sit on federal public land. If the U.S. Forest Service greenlights logging in an old-growth forest, no state official can stop it.

"It's really disingenuous to say if states want to protect habitat, they can do so," said Servheen. "That's not their role, that's not what they do... The federal agencies manage the land base."

And the political reality makes it worse. "Most state legislatures are pretty strongly captured by development and real estate interests," said Kate Groetzinger of the Center for Western Priorities. The states most likely to have their wild places carved up are the least likely to pass new laws stopping it.

Who wins

Follow the money and the answer is obvious. The American Petroleum Institute and other oil and gas groups filed comments supporting the rollback. They wanted fewer limits on where they can drill. The change hands the extractive industries exactly what they asked for — the freedom to develop land that used to be off-limits because an endangered animal lived there.

A coalition of environmental groups has already filed suit to block the rule. Two tribes in Washington state filed their own lawsuit, arguing the change will destroy tribal fisheries the federal government is legally bound by treaty to protect.

But there's a long-game danger even in fighting back. If one of those cases reaches the current Supreme Court, a conservative majority could lock in a gutted reading of the Endangered Species Act for good — leaving even a future president unable to restore habitat protections without an act of Congress.

The bottom line

The Endangered Species Act has been one of the most successful conservation laws in American history. It's why we still have bald eagles, grizzly bears, and salmon runs. The one thing that made it work was simple: you can't save an animal if you destroy the only place it can live.

The Trump administration just decided that destroying those places is fine — as long as you time it for when nobody's home.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Alex Brown for Stateline, republished by the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Photo: Tom Kogut / U.S. Forest Service via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.