At least 800 more are expected to join the endangered list. By year’s end, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt will likely release a report designed to overhaul the ESA, as the administration has been doing since January.

The Trump administration has argued strict regulations under the ESA hinder development and are a roadblock to “energy domination.” The executive orders Trump signed this year direct agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that would speed up fossil fuel projects and circumvent the kinds of environmental reviews that have blocked them.

Burgum and other conservatives say the law is broken. They argue the ESA’s strict rules do little to ensure recovery.

Scientists and legal experts say the law isn’t the problem: It’s been chronically underfunded and has suffered from wavering political support.

“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.”

Legal experts say it’s important to remember the ESA’s successes in not only recovery but in prevention. Since the law’s inception, just 26 species on the federal list have gone extinct. At least 47 species on the list have not been found since being listed and are presumed extinct. By contrast, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates at least 573 species have gone extinct worldwide since 1996 alone.

“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 list of success stories is lengthy. The law’s biggest success is the bald eagle, which became a symbol of the United States after conservationists took action in the 20th century. In the 1960s, the country had only a few hundred nesting pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states, largely due to the use of the pesticide DDT and loss of habitat. After DDT was banned in the U.S. and the eagle was given ESA protections in 1978, numbers slowly rebounded. In 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the iconic bird, with nearly 10,000 breeding pairs reported nationwide.

The ESA has also helped other species recover, such as the American alligator and Steller sea lion.

The ESA also protects species on private property, and that has been a consistent point of contention over the years. More than two-thirds of species on the federal list depend on private lands, and about 10 percent live only on those lands.

“Your ability to use that land is going to be limited, and you can be prosecuted,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary. “That discourages landowners from cooperating.”

Some studies have suggested these regulations create “perverse incentives.” In one study, researchers found timber harvesting was accelerated in areas where the red-cockaded woodpecker was present. The reasoning: Trees would be cut before the federal agency listed the bird’s habitat and imposed restrictions.

Congress has tried to provide incentives to landowners in recent years, such as tax breaks, conservation easements, and compensation for any lost revenue that might occur from the habitat restrictions. But the number of those types of programs has shrunk in recent years, a trend that alarms many conservationists.

The ESA once had bipartisan backing, but it has become one of the most litigated environmental laws in U.S. history. Efforts to weaken the law have arisen in several Republican administrations only to be revoked when the political winds shifted.

But conservationists say the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of ESA protections and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court could significantly reduce the law’s reach in a way that’s permanent. Meanwhile, mounting threats from climate change and habitat loss continue to push more species toward critical levels.

Harvard Law School’s Andrew Mergen, who spent years litigating ESA cases before leaving government in 2017, argues the conversation should be about resources, not rollbacks.

“The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is committing enough funding and political will to help species recover, not dismantling the protections that keep them alive.”

Despite political wrangling, recent developments show what’s possible. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the Roanoke logperch, a freshwater fish, had recovered enough to be delisted. Burgum celebrated the decision as “proof” that the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

But conservationists say the recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restorations, and expensive reintroduction efforts. Many of those programs were initiated 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.”