The Trump administration has sought to roll back the ESA since January, with officials arguing strict regulations limit development and amount to “energy domination” by federal agencies. This year’s executive orders have also instructed federal agencies to rewrite ESA rules in ways that could expedite fossil fuel projects and circumvent the law’s required environmental reviews.

Conservatives like Burgum argue the law is broken, and its stringent rules do little to advance recovery. Scientists and legal experts point to the ESA’s long-term funding shortages and political swings as the real culprits.

“We continue to wait until species are in dire straits before we protect them,” said David Wilcove, an ecology professor at Princeton University. “That makes recovery far more difficult and expensive.”

Experts note the ESA has done what it was designed to do: prevent mass extinctions. Since 1973, just 26 listed species have become extinct under federal protection, while at least 47 species are believed to have disappeared after being proposed for a listing but never making the list.

“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 law’s most famous success story is the bald eagle. In the 1960s, widespread DDT pesticide use and habitat loss had reduced eagle numbers to just a few hundred nesting pairs in the lower 48 states. When DDT was banned and the bald eagle added to the ESA in 1978, numbers gradually rebounded. By 2007, the species was officially delisted after nearly 10,000 breeding pairs were counted.

American alligators, Steller sea lions, brown pelicans, grizzly bears and many other species have similarly benefited from targeted protections.

The ESA covers both public and private property, often to the latter’s chagrin. More than two-thirds of listed species depend on private lands, and roughly 10 percent are found there exclusively.

“If a landowner has a listed species on their property, 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.”

In some cases, studies have suggested the ESA’s rules create “perverse incentives” that lead to worse outcomes for wildlife. A review of timber sales in red-cockaded woodpecker habitat found wood was often harvested more quickly in areas where the woodpecker lived, likely to get ahead of federal habitat restrictions.

Congress has over the years attached incentives such as tax breaks and conservation easements that financially compensate landowners for habitat protection. Such programs have declined in recent years, and many conservationists say more are needed.

The Endangered Species Act enjoyed wide bipartisan support until recent years, but it’s become one of the most litigated environmental laws in the U.S. And while efforts to weaken it have come up under several administrations, they’ve always been rolled back when control switched parties.

Today, conservationists worry the Trump administration’s more aggressive push to relax protections, paired with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, could set a lasting precedent to narrow the ESA’s scope. In the meantime, climate change and habitat loss continue to drive more species to crisis levels.

Andrew Mergen, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School who spent two decades litigating ESA cases, argues the law’s successes and failures don’t depend on deregulation. The question, he said, is whether Congress is willing to commit the necessary funding and political capital to help species recover.

“The law has prevented extinctions,” he said. “The real challenge is not dismantling the protections that keep them alive but devoting enough resources to actually help species bounce back.”

Political battles over the ESA aside, recent news shows what is possible. In July, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the Roanoke logperch, a small freshwater fish found in streams in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, has recovered enough to come off the endangered list. Burgum declared it “proof” the ESA is no longer “Hotel California.”

Conservationists note, however, the fish’s recovery took more than three decades of dam removals, wetland restoration, reintroduction efforts and thousands of dollars, an initiative that began long before Trump entered the political fray.

“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.”