On his first day back in office, President Trump signed multiple executive orders designed to advance policies that are disastrous to wildlife and their habitats. The orders expand oil and gas drilling, mining, and logging; undermine bedrock environmental laws; and withdraw the United States from an important international climate agreement. If fully implemented, the orders will exacerbate the climate crisis and erode critical protections for America’s public lands and waters and the wildlife they support.
Invoking the National Emergencies Act, Trump declared the first-ever “national energy emergency” to facilitate leasing, production, transportation, and refinement of energy resources on federal lands. The order directs multiple agencies, including those responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act (ESA), to operate under emergency provisions, which often allow for truncating important consultations and other processes designed to limit environmental harm.
The ESA’s emergency rules, once invoked, require the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to do nothing more than issue nonbinding recommendations to other federal agencies on ways to mitigate harm to species and habitats from agency projects. Formal consultation with the agency on the projects’ impacts on threatened and endangered species is deferred until after the harm has already occurred. The emergency declaration also requires four meetings per year of the Endangered Species Act Committee (often referred to as the “God Squad”), which has met only six times previously in the ESA’s entire 50-year history. The committee may, under certain circumstances, exempt a federal agency’s action from the prohibitions of the ESA, giving it the authority to potentially doom a species to extinction.
Another executive order abandons the previous administration’s commitment to conserve 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030 and lifts bans on offshore oil and gas drilling in public waters off the Alaska, Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts. A separate order reopens oil and gas leasing in Alaska’s extremely fragile and ecologically vital Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and repeals protections in the state’s Tongass National Forest, potentially ushering in industrial-scale logging of irreplaceable old-growth forest that provides habitat for hundreds of species.
Trump also issued an order directing the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to limit global temperature increases by cutting fossil fuel emissions that was adopted by 195 nations in 2015. This action mirrors a similar directive issued by Trump in 2017 during his first term, making the United States the only nation to withdraw from the agreement—now twice. (In 2021, President Biden reversed the previous directive.)
A further order seeks to strip civil service and due process protections from tens of thousands of federal employees, a prelude to dismantling programs and dismissing much of the federal workforce, including the personnel needed to protect endangered species and habitats and address climate change.
Expanding fossil fuel production and reneging on climate commitments ignore the grave consequences of climate change that are compounding many species’ declines. Importantly, many of these orders require additional actions from Congress or federal agencies to achieve the stated objectives, which provide opportunities for the public to oppose those actions. AWI urges all animal advocates to join us in the fight to protect the wild animals who call our public lands and waters home.