The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed this weekay to restore automatic protections for species listed as “threatened," as the Biden administration moved to roll back a Trump-era overhaul of the way the Endangered Species Act is implemented.
The proposed revisions “are poised to undo most if not all of [that] administration’s damage to the Act,” said Earthjustice, an environmental law firm.
But a key Republican congressman, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., blasted the proposals. “The Biden administration is rolling back commonsense reforms and further turning the ESA into a political battering ram rather than a conservation tool,” he said.
Defenders of Wildlife said the automatic protection provision” “gives threatened species on land and in freshwater the same protections as endangered species unless otherwise specified." While industry generally supported the changes, environmentalists challenged in court. After Joe Biden was elected president, the new administration decided the regulations warranted review.