This story is part of our series, Wild Pennsylvania. Check out all of our stories here.
The federal Endangered Species Act is getting attention in Congress. In early March, the ESA Amendments Act of 2025 was introduced in the House by Bruce Westerman, the Republican House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman. Westerman said in a statement that the act has failed to achieve its intended goals and “has been warped by decades of radical environmental litigation into a weapon instead of a tool.”
Environmentalists are against the proposed changes, including the group Defenders of Wildlife. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with their attorney Sierra Weaver about it.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: Of course, most people have heard of the Endangered Species Act, but I don’t know that everybody really knows how it works, so could you just say a little bit about how the Endangered Species Act protects wildlife?
Sierra Weaver: I think it’s important to know that the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. It was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, something that is unheard of these days, and it was signed by President Nixon.
So this is a law that is very long-standing and very well supported from all sides of the aisle. It works by saying states manage wildlife, generally speaking. But when species get to such a dangerous level that they’re at risk of extinction, we’re going to put up a federal backstop. When that federal backstop kicks in, we’ll put species on a list, the Endangered Species List, and we’re gonna say that species on the list get special protections. You cannot kill them. You can not harm them. You need to make sure your activities are not harming their habitats such that you would impair their breeding or feeding or essential life functions.
The idea is that this protection provided by the act is really sort of an emergency room. So you provide this devoted effort, extra protections, while you get the species back to health. And then at some point, they will be delisted and the management will go back to the states. So that is the way it is envisioned to work.
Kara Holsopple: What have been some of the successes?
Sierra Weaver: I love that I’m talking to folks from Pennsylvania because bald eagles are one of the really great successes. So you have this American icon, and it was down to just a couple of breeding pairs in the early 1980s. It’s really rebounded and gone back to an incredibly healthy population, and is one of those success stories where you were able to delist the species and where folks all across the state can see them out in the wild and get to experience that connection with nature.
Kara Holsopple: What is the ESA Amendments Act of 2025, and what does it propose?
Sierra Weaver: This is a bill that we are really thinking of as the Extinction Act because it is not about improving the protections of the Endangered Species Act. It is really about pushing through industrialization, pushing through development, pushing through projects that right now might be slowed down in order to protect species and ensure that they can recover. It’s disrupting that balance, and we’re afraid of really gutting the protections that have been so important for this country and for our natural history and legacy.
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Kara Holsopple: What are some of your main concerns about it? What are some of the actions that it proposes and that you’re particularly objecting to?
Sierra Weaver: The way I think of it is that this bill would make it harder to list species. It would make it harder to protect species that are listed, and then it would kick them off the list just as quickly as it can. So it would really make species protection harder all the way along the path.
Some of the ways it does this are the Endangered Species Act requires the use of best available science. So science is really the underpinning of the current law. This act would say that if a state or a local government or a tribe or really any of those interested parties submit science, we’re going to call it the best available, no matter the quality of the research. That’s a big concern of ours because that really undermines one of the cornerstones of the act.
“It is true that we still have a lot of species that are in need of protection. But those species have not gone extinct. They have stayed on the landscape, and we are still fighting to recover them.”
It also makes protections for threatened species a lot weaker. If you think about the Endangered Species Act, there are two levels of protection. There are the endangered species, which are most at risk of immediate extinction, and then there are threatened species, those species that are likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future.
Again, if you take the emergency room analogy, you don’t want species to get to that super-endangered place. You want to protect them as much as you can at the threatened level. This would take away a lot of those protections for those species that could still be saved with relatively little effort.
[The bill] would push those species further into that endangered category before the full protections of the act kick in. So the way I think of it is, it does away with a lot of the planning and precaution that are built into the act and makes it that much weaker and that much harder to protect.
Kara Holsopple: Proponents of the bill say that only 3% of listed species have ever been classified as recovered and then delisted, and that this bill will streamline the permitting process and make the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service more accountable. What would you say to those talking points?
Sierra Weaver: I would say that when you think about species extinction, this is not something that happens overnight. This is something that takes a long time for a species to go from a healthy population to one that is literally about to blink out and no longer exist on this planet. So when we think about recovery, we think of a long-term investment.
So yes, it is true that we still have a lot of species that are in need of protection. But those species have not gone extinct. They have stayed on the landscape, and we are still fighting to recover them even in the face of climate change, even in the face of increased development. I would say that the act is absolutely working, even though we still have all of these really important needs for species on the landscape.
As to this notion of making the Fish and Wildlife Service more accountable, I would say it would make the Fish and Wildlife Service just so much weaker. This agency needs the power to use its expertise, and needs the ability to use the best available science to take actions to protect species. And this act would really take that power away and make it impossible to recover species in many instances.
Kara Holsopple: What would you say to people who say endangered species are important, but people are more important? We need to focus on people and what the government can do for people, and not slow down progress.
Sierra Weaver: I think that’s one of the really important things about the Endangered Species Act: it really provides a balance. It says we’re going to look really closely at can you do this better? Can you do it in a way that provides more protection for species and less harm? Can we do this in a way that’s lighter on the landscape and more protective of these species, and still have that forward progress?
So we don’t think there’s any inconsistency between caring for people and caring for species. In fact, we think that if you care for species, you are caring for people because those species provide so many important ecosystem services. Whether it is clean water or pollination, these species are part of the web of life that supports us, too.
Kara Holsopple: Is there anything else people should know about the ESA Amendments Act or what you guys are trying to accomplish?
Sierra Weaver: I would just say that now is the time to speak up. You don’t have to wait for an urgent threat. We need to create a constituency for nature in this country and for people to realize that they can speak up for it all the time. We know that people love their hunting and their fishing and their family vacations, and camping trips. That’s what we’re talking about here, that connection with the natural world that’s so important to all of us.
Sierra Weaver is an attorney with Defenders of Wildlife.
