The dunes sagebrush lizard is about two and a half inches long. It lives in one place on earth: a narrow band of wind-blown sand dunes and shinnery oak in the Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. It eats insects and spiders, and it burrows under the shrubs to keep from cooking in the Texas sun.

More than 95% of that ecosystem is already gone — bulldozed and drilled for oil and gas, sprayed with herbicide for grazing, and dug up for the sand that fracking uses, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

The federal government listed it as endangered in 2024. Ken Paxton sued to undo that. Last week, he won.

What happened

The Texas Tribune reported the outcome on July 29. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has ended the lizard's endangered species protections as part of a settlement reached July 21 in Paxton's lawsuit against the federal government.

The settlement doesn't just pause the protections. It vacates the 2024 listing entirely, sending the agency back to reassess the lizard's status — a process Paxton's own press release says is expected to take up to two years.

Paxton's argument in the lawsuit was that the Wildlife Service failed to use "the best scientific and commercial data" when it made the designation. His statement on the settlement:

"Texas, its people, and its industries should not have to suffer the effects of an illegal rule while the Fish and Wildlife Service further evaluates the status of the species."

Look at the word order there. "Texas, its people, and its industries." That third item is doing the work.

This wasn't a court ruling against the science. It was a deal.

Here's the part that deserves attention. This wasn't a judge weighing the biology and finding the listing unsupported.

On June 3, 2026, the Fish and Wildlife Service — the agency that had made the endangered determination two years earlier — filed a joint motion with Texas asking the court to throw out its own rule. The agency charged with protecting the species asked to have the species' protections removed.

Conservation groups tried to intervene to stop it. Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, called it what it looked like:

"We're urging the court to reject this obvious attempt by Trump to undermine the Endangered Species Act just to promote oil and gas extraction."

"This is the third time in a year that the Trump administration has begged the courts to abandon the lifesaving and science-based protections that dunes sagebrush lizards desperately need."

And this isn't a one-off. In February 2026, the lesser prairie chicken — whose habitat spans Texas and four other states — was stripped of its endangered status in response to a court order. Rylander's read on the pattern:

"There appears to be a disturbing pattern of the Fish and Wildlife Service ignoring its mission to save struggling wildlife like dunes sagebrush lizards and lesser prairie chickens for the convenience of Texas politicians and big oil and gas polluters."

Who benefits

Oil and gas companies had warned for years that the lizard's endangered status would slow down every stage of Permian Basin projects — permitting, drilling, sand mining, pipeline construction. That's the whole fight. The lizard is small; the acreage it sits on is not.

This is also not the first time Texas officials went to bat for the industry on this exact animal. A 2012 attempt to list the lizard collapsed after then-Texas Comptroller Susan Combs and oil and gas groups objected and cast doubt on the science.

So who is Paxton working for here?

He is currently running for the U.S. Senate. According to the Texas Tribune's review of the money in that race, the biggest donors to the main pro-Paxton super PAC include Douglas Scharbauer, a Midland oilman, at $750,000 — a longtime Paxton supporter who has given him six-figure sums before. The second-largest, at $950,000, is Preserve Texas Inc., a Virginia-based dark money group formed shortly after Paxton launched his Senate bid, whose actual donors the public isn't allowed to see.

Paxton's record on this is long and consistent. When Massachusetts opened a climate investigation into ExxonMobil, Paxton sided with the company and tried to block it. He has called climate change a "matter of opinion."

He used the attorney general's office to shield the oil industry from accountability. The oil industry is now helping to pay for his Senate campaign. And his office just used state legal firepower to remove a federal protection standing between that industry and more Permian acreage.

Why a lizard matters when your electric bill doesn't go down

It's easy to make this sound trivial. A little lizard, a lot of lawyering. Who cares?

Here's who should. The Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws that puts any brake at all on what an extraction industry can do to a landscape. When it can be switched off by a settlement between a state attorney general and a federal agency that has stopped defending its own science, the brake isn't real anymore.

And notice what ordinary Texans were promised in exchange: nothing. Paxton's statement doesn't mention cheaper gas, or jobs, or a single benefit to a household. What changed is that restrictions on where and how fast companies can drill went away, and the last sliver of a Texas ecosystem lost its legal protection.

The lizard doesn't have a super PAC. That turns out to be the whole story.

Source

• Ayden Runnels, Paxton lawsuit prompts end of federal endangered species protection for Texas lizard, The Texas Tribune (July 29, 2026). Photo: Ryan Hagerty / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.