In addition to reducing funding, the Trump administration has repeatedly attacked the ESA itself since January, saying that too many stringent regulations put a damper on development and were hindering “energy domination.” The executive orders Trump signed this year call on agencies to review ESA rules in ways that could streamline fossil fuel projects, sidestepping the type of environmental reviews they would otherwise face.

While Burgum and other conservatives paint the law as broken and point to its strict rules as obstacles to recovery, scientists and legal experts say the real issues are decades of underfunding and political inconsistency.

“Essentially, we continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

A History of Prevention, Not Just Recovery

Critics say the ESA has been ineffective at recovery. But experts point out the law has also been effective at preventing mass extinctions.

Of the more than 2,000 species that have been listed since 1973, just 26 have been known to go extinct while under federal protection. And on average, it took 32 years from the time a species was listed before it was declared recovered. At least 47 species are believed to have gone extinct on the road to listing, according to data compiled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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

The ESA’s biggest success story, the bald eagle, would have likely died out were it not for protections. In the 1960s, DDT—a pesticide that interfered with eggshell production—and widespread habitat loss left a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. After DDT was banned and the bird was listed in 1978, numbers slowly began to rise. In 2007, it became the first species delisted under the ESA, with nearly 10,000 pairs nesting in the lower 48.

The American alligator, wood stork, and brown pelican are other examples of species that have made comebacks in recent decades thanks to ESA interventions.

The ESA’s biggest challenge may be balancing protections with economic development on private lands. While species living on federal property can be managed with less pushback, those on private property have long been a battleground, with many owners and industry groups charging that habitat protections infringe on their rights.

“We have found over the years that your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at the University of William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have even found these strictures create “perverse incentives,” such as timber being logged early in an area that the red-cockaded woodpecker calls home, so a landowner can avoid federal habitat restrictions later.

Congress has, over the years, created a number of incentives for landowners to work with the government, such as tax breaks and conservation easements, in which a landowner is compensated to protect a habitat. But these programs have eroded in recent years, some conservationists fear.

The Future of the ESA

The ESA was considered a bipartisan issue for decades, though today, it’s the most litigated environmental law in the country. Various attempts to chip away at the ESA have surfaced under multiple Republican administrations only to be repealed when control of the White House changed.

Conservationists today worry that the Trump administration’s unprecedented rollback of protections could permanently shrink the ESA’s reach, especially with the prospect of a conservative-leaning Supreme Court looming.

Harvard Law School professor Andrew Mergen, who worked in federal agencies for more than three decades, litigating a host of ESA cases, said the battle should be about resources, not deregulation. Mergen said the answer to both critics and supporters is “fund the hell” out of the ESA. “The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is whether we’re willing to commit the resources necessary to help them recover, not dismantle the protections that have allowed them to avoid extinction.”

The Bright Side

In recent weeks, however, there has been some good news. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, is no longer on the endangered list, having recovered enough to warrant removal. “I think this proves the ESA is no longer Hotel California,” Burgum said at the time.

But conservationists note the recovery of the fish took more than three decades, starting with dam removals and wetland restorations, as well as reintroduction efforts that cost millions of dollars. All these programs were approved and launched before the Trump administration took office.

“The optimistic part is that we know how to save species when we put the effort into it,” Wilcove said. “The question is whether we’ll make that commitment.”