Trump administration’s endangered species habitat rule repeal takes effect, facing bipartisan pushback in Congress

By Kate S. Petersen, CNN

(CNN) — A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill is pushing back on a seismic shift in US environmental regulation that experts say exposes previously protected endangered species’ habitats to destruction from land use such as logging and real estate development.

In July, the Trump administration repealed a 50-year-old regulatory rule that has protected certain wildlife habitats under the Endangered Species Act, a move that has drawn legal challenges from environmental groups and a coalition of 20 states and Washington, DC.

Some lawmakers in both GOP-controlled chambers of Congress are also looking to block the change, which officially took effect Monday. Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Sheldon Whitehouse last month introduced a type of joint resolution that allows for a simple majority vote to nullify the change.

“The senators will look to force a vote in the coming weeks,” a spokesperson from Schiff’s office told CNN.

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In the House, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley introduced a bill to block the rule repeal shortly after the administration announced the finalized version.

“For more than fifty years, our nation’s protections have reflected a basic legal, scientific, and commonsense truth: when habitat destruction actually kills or injures protected wildlife, that destruction is harm,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “The Administration’s rule would erase that longstanding safeguard through regulatory action and leave vulnerable species exposed at the precise moment the law is intended to protect them.”

Since the 1970s, the now-repealed agency rule has defined illegal “harm” to Endangered Species Act-protected wildlife as including habitat degradation that kills by disrupting breeding, feeding or sheltering.

The repeal, which leaves the word “harm” with no regulatory definition, eliminates a primary mechanism by which the Endangered Species Act has protected such habitats from destruction, Deborah Sivas, co-director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford University, told CNN.

The Interior Department said repealing the harm definition “returns the interpretation of the (Endangered Species Act) back to its actual text and original intent, which will end years of federal overreach.”

The department emphasized that “actions that directly injure or kill listed wildlife will continue to be prohibited.”

The majority of native endangered species protected by the Endangered Species Act are threatened by habitat loss, according to experts. Far fewer are threatened by direct killing, such as hunting.

The House bill, the Safeguarding Endangered Species Act, now has six additional cosponsors, Casey-Lee Waldron, a spokesperson for Fitzpatrick, told CNN. All of the new cosponsors are Democrats, and the bill remains in the House Committee on Natural Resources, according to the bill’s profile on Congress’ website.

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