Administrations and legislators have long taken shots at the ESA. Since January, the Trump administration has zeroed in repeatedly on the law, decrying its regulations as development killers that prevent “energy domination.” The executive orders signed by Trump this year call on agencies to review the ESA rules for rollbacks that would speed fossil fuel projects and side-step many of the reviews required for their environmental impacts.

The law, Burgum and other conservatives argue, is broken. Their evidence: that strict rules allow little room for compromise and have done little to actually help recovery.

Scientists and legal experts push back hard on that. The issue, they say, is less the law itself and more a history of underfunding and inconsistent political support.

“The problem isn’t that species are protected too quickly,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them. And that makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

A History of Prevention, Not Just Recovery

Many experts note that the ESA has, in fact, prevented a slew of extinctions. After going into effect in 1973, only 26 listed species have officially gone extinct while under federal protection. Compare that to the at least 47 species that have disappeared while still on the waiting list for a listing, according to TRIP.

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

The bald eagle provides one of the best-known success stories. In the 1960s, DDT use and habitat loss had left the national bird with just a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. After banning the pesticide in 1972 and placing the bird on the ESA list in 1978, numbers began to slowly climb. By 2007, the bald eagle was delisted, with close to 10,000 pairs nesting in the U.S.

American alligators, Steller sea lions, desert tortoises, brown pelicans, and other species have also made comebacks thanks to individual protections.

Hurdles in Private Land

The ESA covers public and private property, which long ago set up a rub point for many. More than two-thirds of listed species need to use private land to survive, and about 10 percent of them live only on private land.

“There’s going to be a significant limitation on what you can do with your own land, and you can be prosecuted for violating the law,” said Jonathan Adler, professor of environmental law at William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some research even suggests the rules have produced “perverse incentives.” A study on red-cockaded woodpeckers showed timber was often cut earlier in places where the bird lived—possibly to avoid future habitat restrictions.

Over the years, Congress has tried to ease those concerns, passing tax breaks and other incentives and setting up conservation easements that essentially pay landowners for preserving habitats. Such programs have waned in recent years, however, raising alarm among many conservationists.

What Lies Ahead for the ESA

The ESA used to be a bipartisan darling, but it’s become one of the most litigated environmental laws in the nation. Various administrations have tried to peel back its strength, only to have their efforts reversed when their party lost control.

Today, many legal experts are sounding the alarm that Trump’s more aggressive rollback of protections—combined with a more conservative-leaning Supreme Court—could result in a lasting contraction of the ESA’s reach. Climate change and habitat loss are also ratcheting up, pushing more species to levels of crisis.

Harvard Law School’s Andrew Mergen has spent more than two decades litigating ESA cases. The emphasis, he said, shouldn’t be on rolling back regulations but instead on investing in enforcement and recovery. “The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help them recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

Hope Springs Eternal

Through the political battles come glimmers of hope. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a determination that the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, has recovered enough to come off the endangered list. Burgum tweeted at the time it was “proof” the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

But conservationists point out that the fish’s recovery took more than 30 years of dam removals, wetland restoration, and expensive reintroduction efforts—projects that were 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.”