Trump Administration Sued Over Endangered Species Records

The Trump administration is facing another court battle over its handling of the Endangered Species Act — this time not over what the law says, but over the records behind how it is being applied. The Center for Biological Diversity sued in Washington on October 15, accusing the administration of stonewalling a Freedom of Information Act request.

At stake is the question of whether habitat destruction still counts as harming an endangered animal — a question the Trump administration has answered with a resounding no.

Trump News: Why an Environmental Group Is Suing the Trump Administration

The Center for Biological Diversity says it sued the Trump administration “for failing to provide public records regarding its evisceration of the Endangered Species Act.”

“The Trump administration is trying to roll back decades of protections for imperiled wildlife under an illegal cloak of secrecy,” said Kristen Monsell, the Center’s oceans legal director. “The incompetence and cruelty underlying these changes could permanently harm animals and plants already on the brink of extinction. Americans have a right to know how their government is implementing these horrible, unprecedented policies.”

The records dispute centers on two documents. First, the Center wants information about how the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Interior Department are handling the “incidental take” of endangered and threatened species since the Service’s directive rescinding the regulatory definition of “harm.” Second, it has requested an official copy of a Service memorandum adopting what it calls a “radical interpretation” of the Act’s prohibition on “take” — a memo the government has never made public.

According to the Center, the agencies have produced none of the requested material — memos, emails, or other correspondence — since its Freedom of Information Act request was filed on August 27. Nearly seven weeks later, the group took the dispute to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

White House News: The Secret Memo Rewriting the Rules

For decades, the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on the “take” of protected species has been understood broadly. The law defines take as meaning to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” an animal. Historically, the Fish and Wildlife Service recognized that this covered both takes intentionally directed against a protected species and takes that happen accidentally — the so-called incidental take that occurs during otherwise lawful activities.

That longstanding interpretation is what the Trump administration has been dismantling — and according to the Center for Biological Diversity, the dismantling has gone further than the public knows.

In September, according to media reports cited by the Center, Brian Nesvik, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, issued a memo that rewrites the Act’s “take” prohibition. Under Nesvik’s interpretation, only intentional killing or injuring of an endangered animal would count as a violation. “A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” the memo says.

The memo has never been made public by the Interior Department or the Service — despite a legal requirement that new agency policies be published in the Federal Register. A policy with sweeping consequences for wildlife enforcement is effectively being applied in secret.

The new interpretation would also eliminate the incidental take statements and permits the Service has issued for decades — authorizations that allow incidental harming or killing of endangered animals during activities such as oil and gas drilling, but that come with safeguards to minimize harm. It goes substantially beyond the July rule rescinding the definition of “harm,” which claimed the Act does not apply to habitat destruction or degradation — a policy that, if allowed to stand, could destroy the places many endangered species live.

The Trump Administration’s ESA Rollback: A Full Timeline

This white house news did not emerge overnight. The Trump administration’s campaign to scale back endangered species protections has unfolded in a steady series of steps since the opening months of the second term, part of a broader push to reduce permitting obstacles for energy, mining, agriculture, and other development:

**April–November 2025.** The administration proposes rescinding the ESA’s regulatory definition of “harm” and floats four rules to roll back Biden-era endangered species regulations, including making it easier to exclude areas from critical habitat designations on economic and national security grounds.

**March 31, 2026.** The Endangered Species Committee — the so-called “God Squad,” a Cabinet-level body that had not been convened in more than three decades — unanimously exempts Gulf of Mexico oil and gas operations from certain ESA requirements, citing national security and domestic energy needs. It is the first such exemption approved in over 30 years, putting whales, seabirds, manatees, and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles at risk.

**July 10, 2026.** The administration finalizes its rule removing habitat destruction from the regulatory definition of “harm.” Within days, environmental groups sue to block it.

**September 2026.** A coalition of 20 states and the District of Columbia files two lawsuits challenging the changes. Senators Adam Schiff and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representatives Mike Quigley and Brian Fitzpatrick introduce legislation to reverse the repeal. The habitat rollback rules take effect on September 14. Also in September, the Nesvik memo reinterpreting the “take” prohibition circulates within the Fish and Wildlife Service — but is never published in the Federal Register.

**October 9, 2026.** The administration asks a federal court to throw out four lawsuits challenging the habitat-rule rollback.

**October 15, 2026.** The Center for Biological Diversity sues over the unanswered records requests.

The 50-year-old Endangered Species Act is credited with helping to save the bald eagle — the national bird — along with the California condor and numerous other animals and plants from extinction. Critics argue this record of success is now being dismantled piece by piece, with each regulatory change removing another layer of the law’s protective architecture.

States, Tribes, and Green Groups Push Back in Court

The records lawsuit is just one front in a much larger legal offensive. In early September, 21 attorneys general — representing 20 states and the District of Columbia — filed two lawsuits, one against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and another against the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. The states seek to vacate the agencies’ rules, arguing they “significantly weaken protections for our nation’s most imperiled species.”

The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by attorneys general from the West Coast to the Northeast and Midwest, claim the revised regulations violate the Endangered Species Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“For over half a century, the ESA has stood as a bipartisan example of what it means to protect an irreplaceable part of our planet, but these new rules attempt to destroy longstanding and integral regulatory protections and open the door to further species decline and possible extinctions,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Today, we are taking action to protect our environment and all those with whom we share the planet.”

Beyond the “harm” definition, separate rules ended automatic protections for newly listed threatened species and let economic considerations weigh more heavily in critical habitat designations.

Native nations have entered the fight as well. Tribal governments sued over the ESA changes, with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe raising the case of the Dixie Valley toad. “It is obvious that removing water from a species that needs water to survive harms both individual members of the species and the species’ population,” wrote Tribal Chairwoman Cathi Williams-Tuni about the change and the potential impacts of a nearby proposed geothermal project — one that was halted in 2022 after the toad was listed as endangered but could now resume.

“These harms in Dixie Valley would be catastrophic, permanently ruining the Tribe’s sacred site and ending the ability to use the springs for medicine and ceremonies,” Williams-Tuni said in public comments. Beyond the toad itself, the tribes warn that the new rules sideline tribal consultation: destroying habitat in a way that harmed a protected species once required a permit that normally triggered tribal consultation, and such permits would now be required much less frequently.

Bob Anderson, a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School and a member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, told High Country News that the changed definition would require proof that harm to wildlife was intentional — something extremely difficult to establish in court. “Companies won’t have any incentives to negotiate with the government or environmental groups or tribes about how their activities are going to affect the listed species,” he said.

DOJ News: The Administration Asks Courts to Toss the Challenges

The Trump administration is not merely defending the rollbacks — it is trying to end the lawsuits before they are heard. On October 9, the administration asked a federal court to throw out four lawsuits challenging the habitat-rule rollback, filing motions for summary judgment.

The government’s argument is blunt: federal wildlife agencies can no longer treat habitat destruction alone as “harm” to protected species, because the regulatory definition of harm has been rescinded — so the lawsuits challenging the new reading should be dismissed as a matter of law.

The four lawsuits targeted by the dismissal motions were brought by the National Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife, the state of California and other plaintiffs, and the Environmental Protection Information Center. The outcome of those cases could have sweeping implications well beyond wildlife law: federal permits, interagency consultations, and ESA restrictions are routinely triggered by activities that affect habitats — from agriculture and energy development to infrastructure projects. If habitat destruction no longer counts as “harm,” many of those triggers fall away.

The plaintiffs’ response is that the government failed to justify the policy changes and failed to properly assess their environmental effects, raising claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

What Happens Next for Endangered Species Protections

Several parallel tracks will determine how this fight plays out. The new Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in Washington will test whether the administration can keep its ESA implementation documents out of public view. The four summary judgment motions filed October 9 could resolve the core habitat-rule challenges quickly — or set up lengthy trials and appeals. The states’ lawsuits in the Northern District of California will grind forward alongside the tribal challenges and the Sierra Club’s cases.

Meanwhile, the legislative track continues. The measures introduced by Senators Schiff and Whitehouse and Representatives Quigley and Fitzpatrick would restore the rescinded definition of harm — but with the midterm elections 2026 just two weeks away, their fate is deeply uncertain.

Under the new framework, habitat modification no longer triggers the ESA’s protections so long as no animal is directly injured or killed — and under the unpublished Nesvik memo, even incidental killing may fall outside the law’s reach if it was not intentional. The courts — and now, in the records lawsuit, the public’s right to see the documents — will decide whether that argument stands.

Source: Center for Biological Diversity